Migrating to CaptureOne; Managed vs Referenced catalogue benefits

[Woodstock]

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For a variety of reasons with which I don’t need to bore you, I am seriously considering moving from long term LightRoom use to CaptureOne

 

There are however a few questions to which I have only been able to find non-straightforward, and sometimes seemingly contradictory answers, even on occasion on the official CaptureOne site. I suspect that this is at least in part related to posts which do not make it clear which version of the software they are talking about.

 

1. Despite CaptureOne offering the Managed catalogue option as a robust methodology I understand that purists suggest not using that option as a glitch in either the catalogue or the image storage software/databases may damage both aspects (still a problem despite proper back up strategies?).
2. They also suggest that it is easier to run out of space than with the Reference catalogue option (but I also read that it is a pretty simple to later change from a Managed catalogue and put the images on a external SSD if storage on the internal drive gets low).
3. It appears that migrating the LR catalogue using a Managed catalogue destroys the folder structure which then requires manual rebuilding (is there not an automated methodology for doing this?) whereas this is not the case using a Reference catalogue.

 

Any information about these points, or general feelings about the benefits or problems of the two cataloguing options or indeed the whole move from LR would be very helpful.

 

Martin

[frame-it]

try creating Collections from Folders before Migration 

[Stephen_C]

I suspect you've already looked at this but just in case you have not here is a Capture One article on the difference between a referenced and a managed catalog. There is also a rather good Capture One forum post about managed and referenced catalogs in the second post in this thread.

I, too, moved from Lightroom to Capture One—seven years ago, in fact. Because I wanted to preserve my original folder hierarchy that I used in Lightroom I chose to use a referenced catalog and have done so ever since. That has worked well for me and I've never found it necessary to experiment with a managed catalog. If you do use a referenced catalog and move photos around outside Capture One you'll need to relocate those photos in Capture One (because Capture One will complain it cannot find them) but that's easy enough to do and, of course, the solution is anyway to move them within Capture One.

Although my migration to Capture One was years ago I recall that the actual business of moving the photos from one app into the other was relatively easy. Of course, you're going to lose your Lightroom adjustments but that's simply something you have to take on board. My metadata was all in sidecar .xmp files in Lightroom so, to the best of my recollection, there was little problem with most of that being recognised in Capture One.

Capture One does have (in my personal experience) a rather steep learning curve but there are some excellent tutorial videos made by Capture One.

In passing, the Capture One profile for my Q3 camera and the results from processing the Q3 files are superb.

What I have always found less than impressive in Capture One is its search ability (particularly given that I have more than one catalog). However, I also use Photo Mechanic Plus and so can resort to that when I have difficulty turning up a photo in Capture One.

Sorry—fairly random thoughts but I hope they are a little helpful.

Stephen

[ianforber]

I had the same experience as Stephen. I moved a Referenced catalogue from LR to Capture One and, aside from losing some pictures because I’d forgotten to make them into TIFFs, it was a seamless process. This was years ago and I have a relatively small number of pictures anyway (~3,500) so I suspect the transition to any software would’ve been pretty easy. 

[Woodstock]

Hi Ian

 

Could I ask you to expand a little on your remark about TIFFs? I thought Capture One dealt with all the main file formats quite happily. Does your comment suggest import problems with non-TIFF images or have I misinterpreted it?

Martin

[Stephen_C]

Capture One does indeed handle all the major photo formats. All my (then .CR2) photos transferred without problem—save, as previously mentioned, I lost the Lightroom adjustments of course. One way you could overcome that problem would be to create TIFFs to bake in the Lightroom adjustments and then transfer the TIFFs to Capture One. However, I don't know whether that's why @ianforber mentioned TIFFs.

Stephen

[Guest]

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Quite a lot of the basic Lightroom adjustments and metadata are preserved when you migrate into Capture One, but obviously not the more complex ones.

The most useful one for me was crop.

The following table lists what is and isn't transferred.

https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006595157-How-to-import-a-Lightroom-Catalog

[marchyman]

Can  Capture One handle Grayscale files yet?  That was the biggest hurdle I had many years ago when switching.  I had many scanned B&W images that Capture One would not process until I converted them  to RGB.  That, along with other Capture One issues, led me back to LrC.

I do miss the Levels panel, though.

[jaapv]

Hmm - I convert Monochrom greyscale files to RGB for more flexible processing. Any reason that you want to process them as Greyscale? - I tend to use that as an output space, if at all (I regularly use Toning) 

[marchyman]

I saw no reason to create files 3x larger than they needed to be when scanning B&W images.  I used what Vuescan calls "Raw DNG" which I believe is a Linear DNG file format.  Hundreds of photos were scanned this way before trying Capture One.  I was quite annoyed to find I needed to convert those files.  Most of the editing on those images was dust removal.  I used the Mac app sips to assign an Adobe RGB profile to the files.   That made Capture One happy without tripling the file size.

[ianforber]

On 9/18/2024 at 2:13 PM, Stephen_C said:

Capture One does indeed handle all the major photo formats. All my (then .CR2) photos transferred without problem—save, as previously mentioned, I lost the Lightroom adjustments of course. One way you could overcome that problem would be to create TIFFs to bake in the Lightroom adjustments and then transfer the TIFFs to Capture One. However, I don't know whether that's why @ianforber mentioned TIFFs.

Stephen

Exactly that. I lost my raw adjustments so now I always create a TIFF version when I’ve finished editing so that I won’t forget to do it if I subsequently transfer to a different software. 

[Woodstock]

Thank you all for your comments. In my particular circumstances there is no doubt that the Managed catalogue option continues to appeal. It would, however, seem to make sense to keep up my Adobe subscription for the moment and initially use Capture One in Referenced catalogue form, thereby allowing both Capture One and Lightroom to "see" the same image files, until such time as I make a decision as to whether to forego LightRoom and move entirely to Capture One, when there would be less potential downside to the Managed option.

 

Martin

 

[SrMi]

On 9/21/2024 at 10:44 AM, ianforber said:

Exactly that. I lost my raw adjustments so now I always create a TIFF version when I’ve finished editing so that I won’t forget to do it if I subsequently transfer to a different software. 

You should be able to open a Lightroom catalog and export to TIFF without an active subscription.