Capture One Pro 7 now has the option of storing your image files as a catalog.
A catalog is a database tracking the location of images and information about them.
The location can be anywhere on various storage mediums
or even inside the catalog file itself.
The information includes how the images are organized in the catalog,
metadata and even what visual adjustments have been made to the images.
Working with catalogs gives you extremely powerful tools to organize your image collection
and equally powerful tools to search for and filter your images.
In the following tutorial we will look at how to build catalogs
and different ways to structure them.
Within the library tool, the current catalog is shown here along with recently viewed catalogs.
Capture One Pro 7 can handle multiple catalogs and can easily switch between
them without having to relaunch.
New catalogs can be created by clicking the plus button next to the pull down menu.
If you are familiar with Capture One Pro 6, then a new 'session' can also be created here.
Sessions do not use the catalog architecture.
Let's start by creating a new empty catalog.
In the next dialog, set the name and location of the new empty catalog.
There are three ways to populate a catalog in Capture One:
Importing images from a memory card or an existing folder on hard disk,
shooting tethered from a supported camera, or importing an existing catalog from Media Pro.
In this case we will import images from a memory card.
Click the import icon in the toolbar to open the import dialog.
'Import from' shows the location of images to be imported.
Memory cards will be automatically detected.
Under 'import to' decide where to store the imported images.
This is where we decide if we want our image files to be placed inside
the catalog file itself or be elsewhere on our system.
Keeping the catalog and the image files separate means that our catalog database
can be very compact and easily stored on smaller storage media.
An example could be that our catalog database exists on our laptop
and the images exist on a large image server.
The great benefit of catalogs is that even if our laptop has no
access to the image server, we can still browse and edit our catalog,
even make adjustments, as the database contains all
the necessary information to do so.
Therefore, we have a compact and portable fully featured catalog.
Alternatively, storing the files inside the catalog itself makes it very easy for
multiple users to access and share a catalog.
As we are importing from a memory card, we should either choose to store the image
files in the catalog file itself or nominate a folder to copy them to.
In this case I'll select the option Choose folder.
Note that with this option we can automatically create sub-folders.
Automatic backup can also be set by checking 'backup enabled' and setting a location.
Decide on the naming format for the imported files. Click here to build any number of naming formats.
Using Image name will retain the existing file name.
Finally, metadata and adjustments can be set in the further two menus.
Check the Include existing adjustments box if you are bringing in raw files that have
already been worked on in earlier versions of Capture One.
Click Import here and the import process will start.
The activity monitor will open showing the import process.
To organize a catalog, use the options within the library tool.
The content of the fixed window cannot be changed and shows fixed
collections of all the images in the current catalog, recent imports,
recent captures and the trash.
The catalog can be organized within the user area.
We'll return to that shortly.
The folder area shows the location of the images in the catalog.
The subheading Catalog shows if there are any images placed inside the catalog
file itself, with a corresponding number shown to the right of the heading.
Next we will see the folder structure of all locations that the catalog knows about.
Here is the folder we just imported.
Right-clicking on the folder will show the option to reveal the complete file
system hierarchy or not.
Clicking the plus icon will allow you to create folders that the
catalog database will also recognize.
This could be useful if you want to move images from one folder to a new folder.
Remember to always complete actions like this within Capture One Pro 7 so that the catalog
database can keep track of changes.
Let's return to the user area.
Clicking on the plus icon to the right gives four options to create albums,
smart albums, projects and groups.
An album is a collection of images.
It has a custom name and images or groups of images and can simply be drag and dropped into it.
A smart album is a filtered album containing an image collection.
The smart album will automatically change its collection contents based on its search criteria.
To help organize your catalog, think about placing albums and smart albums into projects.
Create a project by clicking on the plus icon in the user area just as we
did for creating albums and smart albums.
Choose a name for the project and click OK.
Now albums and smart albums can be dragged into the project.
A final element to organize a catalog are groups.
Groups are a free-form organizing item. It can contain other groups, projects and albums.
To place a new group inside your current project, right-click on the project
and choose New inside and then Group.
Create a name for your group and click OK.
Now, we can drag albums and smart albums inside the group.
Only albums and smart albums can contain image files.
Use the same method for creating other albums inside the group.