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Bye Bye Aperture, Hello Capture One and Photo Mechanic: I made my choice #1
Pascal P.'s picture
by Pascal P.
May 7, 2015 - 10:08pm

I finally made my choice: it will be Capture one, with Photo Mechanic support for ingesting, sorting out and keywording. My new workflow:

1- Import from camera (D800) to a temporary folder with PM: easy and fast keywording and other metadata (weakness of C1), eliminate what belongs to trash. Possibility also for external editing (e.g. Nik filters) if wanted, why not. I loaded into PM my Aperture structured KW list(s).

2- Move images from temporary folder to external drive with my folder and file naming convention: PM is extremely powerful for this job and for creating a backup copy, incredible.

3- Import the pictures into C1 catalogue. No need to bother with the weak KW / metadata options of C. The C1 search is for me powerful enough to retrieve and sort pictures (smart albums) on the basis of metadata from imported Aperture libraries and from PM tagged images.

From Aperture (referenced) to C1: it simply requires some time:

1- Copy in Aperture metadata to originals. Works perfectly per batch of 2000 - 3000 images on my system. Freezes for the whole library (25k images).

2- Import Aperture library into C1 catalogue. Just leave time for the catalogue to create the preview images for which I took a reasonable size (1080). The C1 catalogue is…. much smaller than the Aperture library, that was unexpected from what I saw in the litterature. Time to open the catalogue is 5-10 secs, for 25000 images, initial view: all photos. But all preview images have already been created. I can live with that, vey well.

Settings: folder sync, pref. side car file to original for metadata. If auto sync side car is on: the catalogue freezes, I indicated that to C1 developers.

I found again the full structure of the  Aperture library (albums / projects), can easily rebuild the KW based smart albums. For the edits, I almost exclusively externally edited from within Aperture and had therefore TIFFS together with original files. If not, a JPEG version from the  Aperture edited files can be created.

I am  not sure that I would like to get rid of PM at the import stage, I have the feeling that it gives me more compatibility than relying on only one software.

Bye for now, Aperture!

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
May 8, 2015 - 10:32am

‘allo Pascal!

How many keywords do you apply to an image? I can see that if shooting stock where you want garlands of the things C1 on its own would be a dealbreaker. I probably add a face, and a genre or two, GPS and a star rating so am still hoping to “get away with” C1 on its own.

d.

Pascal P.'s picture
by Pascal P.
May 8, 2015 - 11:44am

Hi David, thanks for the question. Quite a lot, sometime, also quite time consuming. I try to answer for my pics the questions Who? Where? What? When?

Best

A sort of poetry game:-)

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
May 18, 2015 - 1:56pm

I’ve had a wee think about this. My bad habit is importing into Aperture and not sticking to a disciplined workflow. I mix up keywording, rating editing etc in a mess. Nothing ever gets finished. So maybe using two packages would be worth it just to sort out my messy workflow. As a first step I’m going to try using Aperture vice Photo Mechanic as the metadata sorter and then C1P as the editor and repository.

d.

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
May 28, 2015 - 12:46pm

Nup, that doesn’t work! While COP does a lovely job of rendering RAW files, good auto adjust and good import of Aperture adjustments it only reads in the bottom level Aperture keyword.

So if you keyword a file “Jimmy the Dancer” and hope it will inherit the parent keywords “City Dance Group”, “Dance” and “Performance” - no it won’t.

This is all so grievous I’m sure COP will be fixing it; adopting it will have to wait until they do as I begrudge having to buy PM as well as COP.

d.

James's picture
by James
June 6, 2015 - 12:38pm

David, 

The importing of hierarchical keywords is a known weakness in C1.  There is a workaround using the pipe character ”|” (but I have no direct experience with it).  Search University of Google for the following terms: capture one importing hierarchical keywords pipe. That will give you several links.  This one seems useful:

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=96960.0;wap2

But, again I have no experience with this.

Best of luck,

James

David Edge's picture
by David Edge
June 6, 2015 - 1:04pm

Thanks James

I’ve got it working. I reviewed my keywords and restructured them as well as I can because they are now cast in stone until at least COP9.

I then edited the keywords as follows with pipes:

Urban

     Buildings

          1920s

          1930s

becomes

Urban

     Urban|Buildings

          Urban|Buildings|1920s

          Urban|Buildings|1930s

COP then reads these in hierarchically.

d.

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