Capture One 21 Live | Master Catalog Organisation

good afternoon or good morning everyone welcome to today's webinar which is all going to be about catalog organization so one of those tasks that we should all be good at but often it gets left out so what we're going to do today is just define what a catalog is and how it works we do a couple of or a few different import scenarios so you get a handle of that and then we look at organizing directly in your system and organizing with virtual collections as well to exercise uh the full power of the catalog before we get to that uh welcome to uh those of you who are out on facebook and youtube at the moment and also to those uh in our weber webinar room as well for those of you in the webinar room if you want to ask a question it helps if you pop it in the q a tab it just separates it out from the main chat and it's a little bit easier for myself and diego to see who's also in the webinar room and for those of you on facebook and youtube then feel free to put your questions in there as well and we will go ahead and answer those as julia is keeping an eye on those channels too all right so uh without further ado let's just move over to capture one just one thing that's also worth mentioning is that today let's just move this window sorry is that today we had a new version of capture one come out very importantly includes lossless compression for the sony a1 series uh some new camera support some new lens support uh support for the latest version of big sur if you're on 11.2.3 so just go ahead and grab that from captureone.com as well okay so let's get started right i'm going to close this catalog down we don't need this it's just better than looking at a blank screen when we come to it and as i said we're going to start from scratch make a catalog do a few different import scenarios do some organization and then we should be good so let's start by saying file new catalog and we're going to call this webinar pm like so oh let's turn on the mouse mouse highlighter so we know where we're looking now by default capture one will put your catalogue in the pictures folder which is a perfectly fine place to put it so all we're defining now is the catalog file and really capture one like any other database driven file management system uses exactly that a database so we are creating a capture one catalog which is a database that knows where your pictures are and knows the adjustments for each of those pictures and the metadata and how everything is organized so really it's just a very smart highly you know efficient performing database now where you put that catalog is relatively important so for the best performance if you're storing it on the workstation that you're working on that's going to be the best solution essentially you can store a catalog anywhere so i could put this catalog on an external drive and it will actually function pretty nicely especially if the connection to that external drive is you know a high performance one like thunderbolt 3 and it's also on a high performance drive like an ssd if i was to put this catalog file on an ancient mechanical old usb 1 hard drive then it's not going to be as good where we place our pictures really is less critical but to be honest so you've got your catalog with you it's good to have it internally on your system so let's say okay if you did want to change the location you can just click this box here and then you have a standard file browser where you can decide where to put your catalog so here we go brand new catalog created what has been built so far so if we look in our finder i placed it in the pictures folder that's all we've got right now is our capture one catalog it's relatively small because it doesn't contain any information or hardly anything because we've yet to introduced any pictures into our catalogue so right now obviously there's nothing going on so we need to get some photos into it and that's where the import dialog comes in which is this button right up here in the top left hand corner import images so let's go ahead and click this one second there we go now i'm going to just reset this tool because that's a collection from this morning so we are going to um just make sure we've deleted all the fun stuff we did this morning so we can start from scratch okay all right so we need to first choose some pictures to import so the first thing i'm going to do is choose a nest of folders so let's say choose and we're going to go and choose on this external hard drive we've got my demonstration images and we're going to choose diego's set of folders actually and the reason why i'm picking diego's is because it's a top folder if you like with a number of subfolders so i'm going to say review for import and that's going to show me the contents of those folders but right now this window is blank why is that because i haven't asked capture one to include subfolders so if i check this box then we're going to see the some content of all those pictures now for these couple of demos we're just going to import everything and then we're going to look at different ways where we can choose to pick and unpick certain pictures as well so we've defined where we want to get our pictures from now what do we want to do with them now really in this import dialogue the two sections that you want to pay the most attention to or import from and import to that's the two things that you have to get right everything else is if you like bonus information under that so we are going to choose add to catalog so what does that actually mean so that means capture one is going to reference and that's the terminology we use capture one is gonna reference where those photos are in their location we're not gonna move them we're not gonna copy them we're not going to do anything else capture one we'll just know where to find them and that would be add to catalog like so and that's what we call a reference file because capture one is referencing where it is in its location so this is great if you've already got um organization structure on your hard drive and you just want capture one to see that then you can do so so capture one doesn't have to move anything around mess up your your organization that you might already have done it will just see it exactly as you have created it so under naming we're going to come back to naming uh in another exercise we're going to do in a minute we could add some basic metadata if we wanted to so let's put diego's name in we could add some adjustments but we're going to do that on our last import and there's some things we can do after the import but right now we're just going to keep it super simple and import everything and say import all like so now these pictures will start coming in let's just open the first one up so what's happening so we've got an activity window up here at the front which says generating previews what does that mean exactly so when we're looking at photos in capture one we don't always have to go and read the raw data so as i scroll through to the next picture i'll go back to this one or this one you see the performance is nice and speedy because what we're doing at this point is just generating a jpeg preview of all of the raw files or tiff files or whatever you're importing into your catalog now it's really uh critical to get the right size of those previews why because if your preview size is too small then capture one will have to every time you switch to a new picture go ahead and read out the raw data so how do you change the size of your preview files so if we look in capture one's preferences and in the image tab you'll see the first option up top here is preview image size and that's pixels on the long edge so that's this distance here so it's really critical that if you're working with for example of 5k imac that you boost this up to 5000 pixels if you're working on a 4k screen then you need to have this set to 3840. so this ensures that your preview is big enough to fill the viewer space if you like in capture one now changing it here is not going to have any effect on existing photos so if you've perhaps been counter-intuitively making this smaller thinking that it will speed up performance it will actually do the opposite it's going to slow down capture one so if you feel that you need to change this and you already have existing pictures then what you need to do is say regenerate previews and that will just go through that preview generation process again so just be aware of that to get the maximum performance out of your catalog as well okay so we've done our first import that was just a super simple one we if you remember we just said uh import from diego's folder we included the subfolders and we said add to catalog so your files will stay where they are so a nice super simple import process now in our first tool tab this is where we manage our library so if we go down to the folders tool and i just expand this one out then we can see we've got the exact same structure if we go to the finder and just go ahead and find diego there we go then you see we've just got the exact same structure here traveler ssd etc etc and then the structure that we see down below like so so all we're doing is just reading those files or referencing them where they are so the folders area shows you that exact location now at the top here catalog collections these are just some shortcuts so we can't change anything thing here it's just showing me the total number of photos in my system regardless of where they are it's going to show me the last 10 imports that we made with the time and date recent captures if we shot tethered and a trash as well user collections we'll come back to once we've done with um importing so let's import something else and do something slightly different so we're going to import again and this time we're going to choose a couple of different folders so let's say choose we're going to go back to demonstration images and we're going to choose danielle's folder who you saw earlier and we're going to choose tina's folder down here as well so i've just sorry they're far apart i've got both selected where's daniel gone i did have both selected there we go now i've got two items selected just with a command click or if you're on a pc that would be an alt click so now i'm going to see the contents of both folders and notice that it says two items and the button says review for import so now if i look at review for import then i can see the contents of both of those folders like so so just be aware that you can do that as well for this import i don't need to include subfolders because there are no subfolders okay um we're going to do exactly the same as before we're going to add to catalogue uh we're not going to put diego's name there because uh he didn't take these um and we're not going to change the naming either so it's going to be similar to how we did before so let's say import all once again so we let those uh complete going to build our previews the preview generation is a background task so if i'd imported 500 pictures but i'm desperate to start editing you can just go ahead and pick anything you like and capture one will prioritize that preview generation so don't sit here and wait for this to finish it's really not worth it i can just go ahead and do what i need to do and then if i you know want to start working on this shot i can do so immediately so don't feel you have to wait for that to stop okay so now we can see under demonstration images we've got danielle's and we've got tina's like so and we've got an additional entry here for my recent imports so at 12 minutes past four mine time we had 20 shots and now the total number of images regardless of where they are is now 69. great so let's do a third import which is going to be a little bit more involved we use some of the more features that we can use in the import dialogue just going to have a quick check for questions um good one from jacom actually how can you change an existing catalog location easy think of this so this is the catalog we made so let's just go and find this this is just a document like a word document or a pdf file or a jpeg or whatever that's all it is and wherever i open it from it will open up in capture one so if i pick this up and then moved it to a different location i could just simply open it again that's really all it is you don't have to do anything fancy i could drag this to an external hard drive and open it from there makes no difference so just treat this as any other document that you would on your computer like a word document like a pdf file you're just opening it in capture one and capture one is there you know finding all the images that you've imported okay um let's see let's close this down one second and let's uh it's great shot pigs on the beach who'd have thought it let's um open up or let's import from a memory card this time so i've got a memory card right here so we're going to stick this in our card reader like so and now we've got the contents of our card which opens up pretty quickly if it doesn't open automatically then just select it from the import from dialog but generally memory cards um get detected pretty you know straightaway so don't worry about that too much so we've got our import from our import 2 this is where we want to change it because we don't want to leave them on the memory card that would be a bad idea we want to get them somewhere safe so this is where the copy to folder option comes in where chat about copy into catalog in a second right now we've only done add and now we're going to do copy to folder so where do i want to put these pictures so i'm going to go to my pictures folder i'm going to make a new folder and i'm going to call this uh capture one photos like so and say create set that as my import folder so now they are going to be imported to capture one photos but now that we've chosen this option we can also define a subfolder so this is really really handy because it means if i'm always going into this import dialogue from memory cards i don't have to change this top location i can just define different subfolders all the time so these are some shots from thailand so i'm just going to chuck in a subfolder here called thailand now the good thing is we can expand on that if we wish and ask capture one to make us some subfolders automatically and the reason or sorry the method of to do that is by clicking this button here which opens up the location subfolder token window which is a bit of a mouthful but basically what a token is extracts some form of metadata from the photo or from capture one to create a folder and a very very simple example of that is the date that the picture was taken so throughout alex's holiday our product manager alex if he wants to divide these up into the different days of the trip he could do that manually but that would be pretty laborious or we can simply say to capture one look at the photo as it's being imported check what the date is create a folder of that date and put the photo in there so just do all that automatically so what we need to find in our big list of tokens is image date so we're going to drop that up there there's various different date formats so let's just grab year month day like so now right now it's just going to create a folder called thailand and then the date which isn't great so what i want to do is i want to have thailand as my top level and then i want to have the date folders filter down under that so all i need to do between thailand and image date is put a forward slash so you can just about see it in there so that's going to make thailand and then another subset of folders under that now we could add more tokens if we want to but that's just a good you know way to get started so let's say okay next thing we want to do is change some naming now this is from this morning's webinar so we're going to delete that and do it all over again so you could of course just use the name that's on the memory card which is normally you know underscore dsc01527 and so on but that's not a super intelligent um naming convention because at some point if you shoot lots and lots of pictures you might get into the situation where you have uh duplicate numbers where it's just rolling over and that actually happened to my own catalogue using a couple of different sony cameras the rx100 that you're looking at me now and a sony a7 had the same naming convention and i had a clash in my catalogue which which drove me crazy because i couldn't figure out what was going on so it helps if you always have you know a unique file name for all your pictures so what we're going to do is we are going to use a few more tokens and i'll explain why in a second we're going to use one called job name and then we're also going to have the image date as well so that appears in the file name itself and we're also going to have a counter to make it unique now a one digit counter is not especially useful so let's make that a four digit counter which is just a little down arrow next to the token itself and now to spread out that naming convention so it doesn't look quite so messy we're just going to put a little hyphen in between each one or you could do an underscore whatever you feel so now we're going to have job name which i'll explain in a minute the image date so let's do year month day again and we're going to have a four digit counter now you might be thinking my word this is an awful lot to set up each time but remember you should only really have to do this once and you can also save a custom preset so you can save your naming preset too there's a few samples here you can play with or you can build your own as well so now let's explain what job name means this enables you to have a naming format which you don't have to always go into this editor and keep changing so let's say okay i'm gonna delete this so under the format here we've got the token job name all that's going to do is look at what's filled in here so in this case it's going to be thailand so i'm going to right thai thailand in here like so and underneath we're going to get a sample name of what my file name should look like so if i just click on one picture it's going to show me what that shot is thailand 20 year 2020 february the 2nd now it's showing me the counter is 68 why is that because i'd already imported some stuff this morning so i just want to reset the import counter by clicking on the three dots and put that back to number one you can also shortcut that if you wish let's add a style at the same time so i'm going to add what we have let's add a lifestyle why not let's go for stockholm one and down here at the bottom after import we could decide to eject the card if we wish we could also erase the images after copying which i think you'd have to be very brave to do if you had a power cut halfway through or some kind of system meltdown that wouldn't be good but if you're brave then you can also do that as well so to recap on what we've done here we're importing from our memory card they're going to go to a folder called capture one photos if we click on this it's going to show us exactly where it is and capture one's going to put them in a subfolder called thailand and then in a further set of subfolders based on the date that the image was captured we're going to rename them using this format here and we're also going to apply a style at the same time now before we get excited and hit import all let's talk about well do we want to import everything maybe maybe not so there's a relatively new feature that was added in capture one 21.1 so if you haven't upgraded do so today so you can get this if we tap on the viewer button like so then we get a larger view where we can see the picture much larger so we can judge focus composition all those kinds of things now the size of this picture is related to really how big your monitor is so if you're working on a 4k display then it will be nice and big it also relates to the size of the preview file that your camera writes into your memory card some cameras do a pretty big one canon and nikon for example their previews are quite large sony is a bit smaller and so on so it does vary so now we want to go through a selection process if you like by the way if you've shot videos then they also play in the viewer which is quite nice but if we want to go through and take away some of these pictures we've got some choices now if we look down here at the bottom for keyboard shortcuts then it shows me or reminds me what those shortcuts are so s on your keyboard for pick a for unpick or spacebar to toggle and cursor keys to move back and forth now i find using the spacebar is by far the easiest way to do it so if i just tap on my spacebar then it just toggles the shot on and off i know you won't be able to see behind but all we have to do is toggle on the spacebar you can just about see it underneath and that will uh toggle it on and off so if i just hide me for a second then it's very easy to go through and then decide okay any of these shots i don't want we've got two similar so let's not have this one don't like that one and so on so it's really speedy to blast through and just tap the spacebar when you need it important point the currently selected shot is always going to be in the middle why because it means if you've got a sequence of photos like perhaps five in a row or something like that then the middle one you'll always be able to see what pictures are coming up let's say it's five very similar bride and groom shots as an example then you'll always be able to see okay when does that sequence ends and when does that sequence start so again we can very quickly go through and browse nice and fast i'm just using my cursor keys and you can see the speed that we can go through so really really super speedy all right well let's import 78 pictures why not just to see the speed and we are good to go so let's say import down the bottom here like so so now uh it's going to be slightly slower because we're importing from the memory card to my hard drive so we've got some writing of data to do previously we were just referencing them in their spot so whilst that's going ahead and again if you're desperate to start editing you can do so so if i wanted to open this shot and start playing around with adjustments there's absolutely nothing to stop me doing that while that's importing if we look here you can see that we've got stockholm number one applied as well if you decided actually for this image it doesn't work we can just click on it and clear it but if you're using a stylus like a you know a base set of adjustments that's a really speedy way to use up your workflow now we're just generating previews that's fine i'm just going to close that and then if we go through we can see the pictures that we have imported and once again that preview generation is a background task so we don't have to worry about waiting for that to finish okay so what's happened in our folders tool if you remember ielts capture one to import them to capture one photos make a subfolder called thailand and then divide them up into their various date folders if we look over at the folders tool then we're going to see now my macintosh hd shows up users capture one pictures capture on photos thailand and then all the various different dates like so so that was quite if you like an efficient import routine because now when i want to import some other stuff from card all i've got to do really is change my subfolder here if i want to i'm going to put it in capture one folders and then for my naming i would just change the job name and then that's it so everything else will work really really nicely so don't feel you have to spend a long time punching all those various different uh data in it's designed so that you don't have to change a lot when you go back into your import dialogue a question from clive i just saw pop up is it a good idea to have a separate catalogue for each year some people do um the disadvantage of having a separate catalog for each year is that you can't search across a wide variety of images but if you shoot you know tons of images like in the hundred thousands or whatever you might find it easier to manage to have several smaller catalogs but really clive there's not a massive benefit in doing that if you like okay um what are we gonna do next let's just check my notes okay so you can now see up the top we've got our three imports that we did and then once again our catalog collection shows us the entire collection of images and these are our three recent imports that we did so let's go down to diego so i'm just gonna collapse that for a second let's mention what this means in catalog because we haven't spoken about this so if we go back into our import dialog the one option that we didn't use was copy into catalog so those of you who perhaps used aperture in the past your ears might be pricking up because this is really a workflow that stems from that if you were using aperture aperture would force you or suggest that you use this kind of workflow and what this essentially means is that anything that you import gets packaged inside your catalog so it disappears inside it so if we look at our capture one catalog if my doc would like to show please if we look at our capture on catalog webinar pm it's got a bit bigger now because we've made some previews if i was to use the import to copy into catalog if i was to use that they would disappear directly inside this now if you're on a pc this shows up actually as a folder nest on a mac it can be packaged into one file but the photos will go directly into it why on earth would i want to do that uh essentially it makes the catalog portable so if i wanted to pick up this catalog and just move it to a different location or a different computer the catalog and photos come with it so it's just in a single package and they're referred to as managed files because capture one is managing their location you have no control over where the pitches are they are just sitting happily inside the catalog the disadvantage of that is of course the more pitches you add the bigger the catalog gets to the point eventually where it will outgrow its storage medium so then you have an issue of deciding well do i make another catalog do i take some out and so on so that's what copy into catalog means now if you want to there's nothing to stop me say cancel there's nothing to stop me grabbing any picture let's grab the pigs and if i drag and drop it to in catalog then they will be physically copied inside the catalog so if i drag it back out and put them back in bolivia then they will go back to wherever i've dragged it to so you can copy between referenced as it is now and managed if i was to drag it there and now that folder our happy beach pigs are now actually inside uh the catalog here now as a hack on a mac if you right click and say show package contents then you'll see a folder called originals and then eventually once we go through this weird subset we will find our actual picture but capture one is controlling this structure so you have no control over that so let's put it pigs back in bolivia like so so um you've seen me do a move there by moving from inside the catalogue to outside the catalog so this is probably a good time to talk a little bit more about folders tool and what we can do here and in particular for moving photos you can move photos within capture one you can also move them within max finder or windows explorer but i would strongly suggest that you do any moving of pictures inside capture one it's more efficient it's faster and you don't break the connection or possibly lose images which i'm going to show you in a second so let's say let's go to denmark for a second so lovely typical snowy danish shot let's say diego had made a terrible mistake and this wasn't denmark and it was actually sweden and he wants to move it into a new folder called sweden so the easiest way to do that is in the folders tool you'll see a plus and a minus this will make capture one aware of additional folders it's not an import function so i need to add a folder to a catalog or you can delete folders from the catalog so i'm going to say plus and then we're going to make a new folder in diego's one called sweden oh it was there already from this morning so let's make another country let's call it norway like so and say create so now capture one is aware of norway it's not aware of sweden because there was no pictures in it to import so now i can pick up our chili cyclist and drag him across to norway like so and just to be absolutely clear if we look in the finder uh where will we travel at ssd oh little tip just stop doing that if we right click and say show in finder or windows explorer capture one's gonna take us straight to that location so now you can see this picture is sitting happily in that folder if i want to move it back then i can just pick it up and drag and drop like so and again capture one will physically move it to that new location you can do a bunch of pictures so if we go to japan for a second and i shift select four photos and i drag them to norway like so then the whole lot gets moved again if i drag four photos and move them back to japan then the whole lot gets moved as well now the good news is if i'd made any adjustment so let's just muck around with this shot for a second so if i've made some adjustments of course if i was to move this to norway then nothing gets busted the adjustments are going to carry along with it so let's put you back in japan so hopefully you can see it's very easy to move pictures around within capture one which is exactly what you should be doing let's say i've made a blunder and i've decided to move this in finder or windows explorer so i'm going to grab it out of denmark and put it in norway like so so now immediately you saw what happened is that this picture is now offline because capture one does not know where it is because i'm an idiot and i moved it in finder when i should have done it in capture one but have no fear what we can do is right click on the picture itself and choose locate so if you do locate then capture one will say well idiot show me where the picture is so now i can think ah where did i put it i'm pretty sure i put it in the denmark folder uh no i didn't did i put it in the norway folder yep there it is so now i can say open and then capture one will sort out the catalog pretty quickly and then you don't have to worry about it and remind yourself to do it in capture one next time same goes for an entire folder if i drag norway on top of denmark like so i'll get a warning saying do i want to move the folder and all its contents yes i do so then now norway is sitting in denmark i'm sure denmark wouldn't be happy about that but if we do our right click and say show in finder we can now see norway is sitting in denmark as well now if i do a stupid thing and move this back like so now the entire folder is being reported as missing has this warning triangle next to it so exactly the same situation as the picture right click choose locate tell capture one what you've done with it so we've put it right here and now i can say open and capture one will sort it back out like so um huh i saw jerome's question uh let's say you moved all your photos to another folder is there a way to locate all of them once instead of one folder at a time so let's talk about that actually i just did that it took me a day so lesson lesson learned jerome um so what you can do in that situation is let's say and i've done this um three or four times when my hard drive has got full up and i store all my pictures on an external hard drive so that got full up and i think what do i need to do uh it's a one terabyte drive you know it's quite an old drive let's buy a six terabyte drive and then move that across and then hopefully i won't have to do it again for a very long time so as we did with making our norway folder we can make capture one aware you know of a of another hard drive and then we could drag the entire contents across to that so if i said plus in folders oh um sorry where's my dialogue gone that's strange capture one's oh it's over here on the other monitor curses wrong monitor i was looking at so i've said plus and now i could add you know any other hard drive that i wanted to so i could add uh the memory card if i want it i'm not going to but i could simply just use this function to add another hard drive and then i could drag my entire folder across to that hard drive and then that way it's done in two actions there's no locate necessary none of that awkwardness so lesson is do everything inside capture one it's much much faster okay um yeah as uh as julia said on facebook if you've if you start with the top level folder it's easy but if you've moved a bunch of stuff in finder and they're all over the place then you've just got to locate it individually so just do it in capture one it's much faster it's much easier so um i think that was what we wanted to do for moving stuff pretty sure yeah so you can move a folder you can move an image you can move an entire nest of folders to a different place if i wanted to so just do all those things within capture one so if i wanted to as an example to move capture one demonstration images to my pictures folder i could do so just by dragging and dropping it into my in the folders area here and it will physically take them off this external ssd and copy them internally all adjustments everything all in place and so on so it's a powerful area so don't feel you need to use the explorer or finder to do so okay what's next so we've spoken about organization down here and this works great for most of us to be honest so by organizing at some point on system level so this is what i refer to at system level so i can go ahead i can browse them in my system so i'm just seeing the exact same structure of the pictures i've imported into my catalog as i see in my hard drives so that's that's fine the good news is if there was uh you know a massive volcano in denmark and copenhagen was destroyed and there was no more capture one then you've still got a pretty good structure that you can transfer to another application hopefully that's not going to happen but it's a good safety thing to have in your mind however the issue with organizing like this is that a single pitcher can only really live in one destination so let's go to alex as an example let's say alex wanted to throughout his holiday just pick out the best 50 pictures or the best 10 pictures that he wants to print or put on instagram or something like that so what can alex do he can do what we did before he can go to thailand we can click plus we can add a new folder called stuff for instagram instagram and then add that to a catalog so now i've got stuff for instagram folder and if i wanted to i could look through my collection of pictures and then drag stuff to that folder but there's an issue with that because now it's it's come out of its parent if you like so this nice organization then breaks because i'm trying to organize it in another way so if you're completely reckless you could think will i duplicate the raw file and it can live in two places but that's very reckless because of course you don't know which one is the most recent in terms of adjustments so it's generally a bad idea so this is where user collections comes into play and as i said this is system level organization because you can see it on your system user collections is if you like virtual organization and you can only see it within capture one so anything i do in user collections doesn't move the pictures it doesn't create folders on my system anywhere it's only visible in capture one so you're using the power of the database to do some really smart organizing so let's take alex's example and see what we can do um i'm just gonna check that any other questions um no i think we're pretty good at the moment oh good point from thomas actually uh it's important to note that capture one allows you to edit offline files that's a perfectly good comment to pull in actually so if i ejected my ssd drive i can actually still edit everything there because we've got the previews that's another benefit of the previews so even if something is offline we can still edit it we can export using the quick proof recipe because that uses the preview there's a couple of things we can't do like use luminosity mask because that requires the raw file you couldn't use the focus mask but most editing you can do so that's pretty handy so if i wanted to take my laptop indoors up to the house but i didn't want to take the hard drive with me i can just disconnect it edit and job done so good point thank you thomas for reminding me that all right so let's take alex alex's example and see what we can do in user collections now collection a collection is just a collection of pictures it could be a folder it could be an album it could be a smart album but this is why it's called user collections and we have four different types of collections which might sound um excessive but they all perform a different job so let's start at the top level with something called project and we're going to call this thailand vk or vke they okay like so and we get this new collection made and the icon looks like a little cardboard box is the best analogy so now alex is going to think all right i want to drag some of the pictures in there actually i want to drag everything so i'm going to go to my recent imports which was this one which is the entire 78 pictures let's just type my browser and i'm going to select them all and i'm going to drag them to the project but i can't why is that because the project can't in itself contain any pictures we need to open that cardboard box and then put some kind of container inside it which allows me to do so so what i'm going to do is right click on thailand vacay and say new inside and we're going to make an album and an album is just a simple container for photos so we're going to say all photos like so so now i've got an album which i can now happily drag pictures to like so so now i've got all 78 pictures sitting in that album now alex is thinking i want to divide these up a bit so i'm going to go back to the project right click and say new album and we're going to call this instagram not with a capital n instagram and now i'm going to look through the shots and think what is instagram worthy so that one's pretty good so i'm going to drag and drop that um let's take our boat dude let's drag and drop that let's have a happy cat and so on you get the idea now if you don't want to drag and drop and you want to speed it up a bit we can right click and we can set this as the selects collection which is very difficult to say so if we set that as the select collection it might be hard to see but there's a little tiny icon there which just looks like an arrow diving into a tray so now if i go back to all photos i can use a shortcut which uh where is it is here add two selects album so command j ctrl j if you're on a pc so now all i can comfortably do if you look at the count here it's three pictures so if i do command j on my keyboard oh i'd already added that one let's choose a different picture that would help so if i do command j on my keyboard oh that's always doing option j that's why if i do command j on my keyboard that now adds this picture so if we go to this one command j or equally if i had a shift selection of pictures like so and did command j then it adds all of those to the collection or we can do you know just a simple drag and drop so if i shift select these three and drag and drop like so so now we've got a couple of different collections going on as well now alex thinks be really cool if i could see all the best pictures that i took so i'm going to right click and we're going to add a smart album inside now a smart album you don't drag and drop pictures to it it populates itself so it fills itself with photos based on criteria that you set for it so if i say new smart album this is going to be best thailand and so i know exactly what it's doing it's just simply five star pictures like so right now we have zero search criteria nothing is here um for speed i can use a preset which is simply loads up rating equals five stars and let's say okay so now i can go through to all my photos and i can use my number five on my keyboard and decide let's just make thumbnails a bit bigger and then i can just use my cursor key and decide okay that's five star that's a five star rule about the cats uh that's a five star let's just tag a few of these uh five so you get the idea so now if i look at best thailand five stars we've now got these populated like so what if we went down to diego and we went to happy beach pigs and we made this five stars what's going to happen is that going to end up in this area no no happy beach pigs why because this smart album is only interested what's in this box so it's only sorting through that box if you like so that's a really powerful aspect of how a project works because it's only interested in what's inside it in terms of using a smart album now you might think well it would be really cool to see all the best pictures in my catalogue which you would be right so what i would need to do is just close this project down go to all images and then i'm going to make a smart album and we're going to call this global 5 star so this means everything in the entire catalog and we're going to use the same preset again and we're going to say okay so now we've got global five stars so if i click on that we've got everything from thailand and happy beach pigs as well because it's outside of the project so it's looking through the entire catalog scouring for five star photos so now if i go to danielle for example and we five star this and then we go back to global five star danielle now pops up in here so that's very useful to be able to have these five star collections i saw a comment um let's see daniel was saying very formal mr grover is doing is tying into my question above is there a way to separate out variants so some are included in a folder or whatever yeah so variants can have different star ratings and different color tags so if i just clone this variant for a second so i've got two happy beach pigs if i make this zero stars then it goes away so yes they can have different color tags and different star ratings so you can define variants like that um there was also a question which has whizzed past so i missed it i think oh that was it martin if i delete an image inside the collection will it delete the picture well you've got choices there so if i simply hit backspace on my keyboard then it will just go from sorry instagram if i hit backspace on my keyboard then it's gone from that collection if i was to right click you'll see delete from album instagram at the bottom if we look in the file menu um or is it the edit menu i'm used to the shortcuts where are you pesky delete here we go so if we look in the image menu we've got delete from disk or move to catalog trash so if you want the security of having a second chance or we can say delete from disk and then it will say are you sure you can delete from the disk or you can remove from the catalog so you've got choices there it just depends which dialog you go into but thankfully the backspace key just takes it out of that collection doesn't delete it forever okay now staying on the notion of these global five-star smart albums these can be very useful for tracking certain things like shots from a particular camera or shots from a particular lens so let's go to all images and let's make another smart album and we're going to say search criteria by hitting plus we're going to find the camera model that's down a bit camera model equals let's say nikon like so and we need to give this as a title so we say shots from nikon and say okay so now if i look at shots from nikon no images in collection why is that maybe i didn't have any nikon shots i do but why isn't that working because i would expect to be able to see this photo here because it's a nikon file but what we have discovered or what you will discover is that the way the manufacturers write their name or their lens models or their camera models is not massively intuitive so there's a much easier way to create these kinds of albums so let's delete that and then let's look in the filters tool so the filters tool will show you if i select all images it will show me how many photos agree with certain metadata like lenses camera make and so on and so forth so you see camera make is not nikon it's nikon corporation so because i didn't type nikon corporation nothing showed up which i know is a bit crazy so how can i use this information to create myself some easier to use global smart albums so let's say we want to see everything so we're on all images i want to see everything from the nikon corporation like so so now i can see those filtered results so to transform this into a smart album and you probably never figure this out without me telling you is these little three orange dots here so if i click that i get another view of the advanced search window and it's pre-loaded that criteria so camera make equals nikon corporation i guess if i'd done camera make contains it would have worked but now we're equaling it perfectly so now if i say create smart album let's give it a name nikon shots now it is popped up here so look just to prove it if i go to instagram and back to nikon shots that shows me everything from a nikon now if we want to be fancy and combine a couple of things we could also do that so let's say let's go back to all images i want to see all my five star shots but only from nikon's so if i hold my option key down or alt and click this then that will combine those two filters so 5 star and nikon only so now if i click on my three dots rating must equal five stars camera make equals nikon corporation so let's create that smart album and we call that nikon five star shots like so so now if we look here we've got nikon shots and then we've got nikon shots that were five stars happy beach pigs once again so if we make this one five stars that's an f file so now that should show up in this album as well this one still of course only shows the five star shots that belong to thailand so the global smart albums are just really useful ways of keeping track of um you know your favorite shots shots from particular camera i've done camera make but you could do camera model as well and if you don't see the search criteria that you're looking for click on the filters submenu here and we can say show hide filters come here stuck on that side of the screen and then you can tick on what you want to have so it could even be by serial number if you wish if you want to see which camera is doing what uh so you can decide by lens uh you know aperture all that kind of stuff which is sometimes interesting so if we do all images and to highlight how ridiculous some of the naming convention is for lenses let's see we want to see or let's clear our search criteria first sorry this clears our current search criteria if we want to see everything that was shot on the sony fe 28 millimeter f2 there's no way i would know that's how the model number looks in the metadata so this is a much easier way to do it let's create a smart album and call that sony fe 28 millimeter shots so whenever i get any new shots from this camera then they're going to automatically load into that smart album uh mark says can you make a adjustments to an image from a smart album absolutely of course it's just a collection like any other so let's go to uh nikon five star and happy beach pigs and just change the exposure and now of course if we look at this in nikon shots then we've got this variant is the same because this one actually didn't have five stars so going back to daniel's question yes you can separate them out but it's just a collection of pictures uh like anything else um just checking other questions and using catalog can you sync a catalog between one on a desktop and a laptop i guess you could do i mean the danger is that um if you're using something like cloud storage what can work let's say if we stored our catalogue on cloud storage then you could technically sync it between any applications that you would like however if you quit capture one before dropbox or google drive has finished syncing and then you go to open it on another machine that's where you can run into issues so it isn't necessarily always a great thing to do uh jonathan says could we just write part of the criteria i'm surprising didn't nikon work that's because uh if we just um edit say edit smart album depends on this criteria equals so i had equal showing if it said contains that would have worked nicely but equals is exactly that it has to match perfectly so if we did contains whatever then that would have worked perfectly jonathan yes all right so now we looked at um let's just collapse filters so we have some space so we looked to album smart terms and projects what is a group group is the ocd sufferers delight including myself which allows you to just organize this area a bit better as i'm sure you can appreciate as you add more and more to your catalogue this list is going to grow and grow and grow and then it's going to get a bit untidy so all group does is just a dumb organization item so let's make a new group and then we're going to call this whatever family vacations just to use that analogy again and then i'm going to drop thailand into that that neatens that up now i'm going to make another group and i'm going to call this global smart albums like so and then i can grab my global five stars my global nikons my nikon 5 stars my sony fe 28 mill shots and so on so now this is starting to look a bit tidier so next time we go on vacation if we can anytime soon i can right click in group and say new project and then let's say dk sorry denmark denmark trip like so and now i'm ready to go again and organize as i wish so really as i said they're just nice organizational items oops family to um tidy up this area and of course if you make a mista spelling mistake like i did you can just edit it like so you can also have you know groups can be you know very extensive so if you need to have more groups inside a group then you can also do that as well if you wanted to divide your trips up into continents you could do that with another group and so on so it's only the the project which has this clever ability to only uh oh sorry at least a smart album inside a project has that ability to only look inside the project itself and by the way if we click on the top level of the project that also shows me all the contents now it doesn't negate you also organizing like this for the reasons i said but this just gives you much more powerful ability to be a little bit more creative with your organization of a particular you know personal trip commercial job just gives you a lot more power and flexibility and that's really what a catalog is designed for um yeah that's a good point from jerome the problem is with having a catalog on a desktop and a laptop is that the images have to stay in the exact same location so if you've got d drive on one as jerome is saying in c drive on another then it's a pain in the backside i mean the easiest thing to do if you want to move your catalog around is rewind to what we spoke about earlier is there's nothing to stop you having a catalog and the photos on an external hard drive then you can just plug that hard drive into any computer open up the catalog and you're good to go so that's another option if it's vital that you're syncing it across different computers that's also a good way to do it um daniel says what's the icon next to the instagram album you must have missed that bit daniel that's the select collection so i can right click and determine any collection as the select collection and then we can just use a shortcut instead of having to drag and drop you can use the shortcut command j to add a photo to the selects album so it's just a bit faster if you want to use a shortcut ah dan david says can catalogues be merged or two or more folders and different catalogs be taken out yes yes and yes so you can do all those kinds of things so first part was can i merge a catalog yes so you can just say import capture one catalog that will merge those two together we can right click on a collection and say export as catalog as well we can right click on this collection and also say export as catalog when you pick this you can also include the reference originals which means it will create a packaged managed catalog sorry so you can extract that out and pop the photos inside it as we said as well so yeah you can do all of those thing you can do all of those things paulo says why can't i select more than one album to see the pictures across the mall the way to do that paulo is if they are in a project then you can see the sum total of all of those but i can't select more than one album like so but by looking at the project then i can see the sum total so it is possible um i see we are pretty much out of time but i think that's how that's pretty much as far as we wanted to go in terms of organization as i said there's nothing wrong with organizing like this in folders the golden rule is do your folder and image moves inside capture one there's no reason that you should need to use finder or windows explorer there's also nothing wrong with combining this kind of organization with virtual organization as user user collections so understand what the project does make sure that you keep it nice and neat and tidy with your groups that just makes for browsing much much easier and appreciate that the smart albums you know work globally across the catalog if they're not inside a project if they're inside a project like this one it's only searching within thailand these here up the top these are all fixed so we can't change anything here just the sum total of all your pictures and the last 10 imports that you made as well if they're annoying you you can just collapse them down like so last little question check oh chris says when do you use groups sorry chris i missed that question so hopefully you picked that up um why does dick was asking why does the new album come up non-highlighted this calls as an additional swipe to give it a name yeah it's a good question actually dick i wonder if that's a big sur thing because i'm pretty sure it used to come up highlighted so if i say new inside it's highlighted for me dick so just double check on that or if i say new album it's actually highlighted so just double check so it might be an os thing but it's not something i haven't noticed myself last question over on youtube and facebook dan says if i import a lightroom catalog and later add photos to the lightroom catalog are the new photos picked up in capture one definitely not dan the catalog import if you like is a one shot so capture one is reading the lightroom database structure and creating its own database structure based on that but it's not synchronized thereafter so if you were to add stuff to lightroom then you'd also have to add it to capture one but it's much easier just to use capture one itself and finally martin i don't have the lens or camera filtered tool that's because in the filters tool you have the ability if we click on these three dots to show and hide different filters so you must have missed that bit but now i can just tick on and off you'll see them disappear if i turn off color tag you can decide exactly what filters you want because there are so many it wouldn't be efficient to include include all of them by default great so thanks for joining us today and learning all the exciting things that you can do with catalogs don't forget to update your capture one to 21.1 for bug fixes new camera support and new lens support as well and of course there's always more lenses coming as well also if you're on youtube don't forget to hit the subscribe because that way if you do subscribe then you'll be notified when we go live half an hour before and also at the point we go live as well so that's just a good way to keep up to date with live sessions that are coming great there'll be more webinars coming up soon and live sessions as well so just keep an eye on our socials to be informed so take care everyone and see you soon bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 26,672

Keywords: capture one, Capture One Pro, raw converter, photo editing software, capture pilot, captureone, Lightroom alternative, aperture alternative, studio software, Switching from Lightroom, Capture One vs Lightroom, Tethered, Shoot tethered, Image capture, Capture One Styles, Captureone styles, capture one pro 20, capture one 20, color editor

Id: YbkBx8djtSw

Length: 69min 31sec (4171 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021