Photo management software (cont'd)

Continuing my search for a replacement for Aperture, I've bit the bullet and decided on Capture One Pro 9 - and started the arduous task of migration about 300Gig worth of memories. A couple of observations for those interested:

- Like Aperture and Photos, Capture One works with catalogs with managed (internally stored) or referenced (remote) files, or any combination. Within C1, it's trivial to move files from managed to referenced vice versa, import and export to other catalogs, and switch catalogs.

- C1's asset management has been hugely boosted since v7, and now improves on Aperture in most respects - like Aperture and Photos, the program is happiest working with keyword and color tags, and it has a similar grading system as Aperture. For every given folder, C1 shows which keywords and grades are used and allows one click selection, making it trivial to home in from complete catalog, to all pictures in a single event without the need to prepare an album or smart album. 

- Ingestion (importing) is similar to Aperture, and allows the renaming of files and addition of certain metadata when importing. Haven't found an ability to add keywords at this stage yet, but I may have missed this. C1 also doesn't seem to recognise duplicates, when adding files to the managed catalog.

- C1 does a good job importing from Aperture, considering the different editing engines.

- The interface is incredibly deep, and it has taken me regular visits to Sigma's FAQ section before I realised it is quite intuitive.

- Cons: although a million times faster than earlier versions, at 9.2.1, C1 is still quite prone to crashing: for instance, move a smart album to an empty group, and * bam *. It's also nitpicky with regards to files: it swallows anything coming from any digital camera, including ancient olympus raw files, but doesn't seem to like other image files, scanned negatives for instance. Most video formats seem supported, but no metadata is allowed, restricting the benefit of importing them. However, both Aperture and Photos haven't been exactly stable, and with a few precautions, C1 behaves itself well. Most importantly for me, C1 misses an ability to change a picture's time stamp.

- C1's dark room functionality is well known, even so I was amazed at how easily I could improve on JPGs by tweaking RAW images. The program practically invites shooting raws.

I have dedicated an older but fast Thunderbolt drive dedicated to the transition, which helps with the shifting of big amounts of data. Longer term, I am still considering whether to go for one big managed master catalog, several smaller ones, or a catalog with referenced files on the NAS. The latter makes it possible to keep all masters on the NAS and the catalog on the main drive, but I am wary of the amount of extra effort it will take to ensure the catalog remains up to date, and new files are stored appropriately. Almost demands an extra program like Photo Mechanic to prep the files before storage. C1 is most flexible and robust with a single big managed catalog, but it's a big draw on computing power and needs a speedy disk.

EJ