[Mike Nelson Pedde Participant Posts: 641]

General

on: February 22, 2021 at 6:42 pm

Hi There:

My friend Mikhail and I are in a similar situation. Both of us have Lightroom 6.14 (the last standalone version) and both of us have fairly extensive catalogues – his is bigger than mine, but once the water’s over 6′ ya gotta swim. In 2019 I switched to Capture One for Sony for my .arw files, but I kept using Lr for my cell phone images. My friend has stuck with Lr for his Nikon and Fuji work. As of January 2021 I’m using Lr only as an archive. We’re both aware of the fact that eventually Lr 6.14 will cease to work – Windows 10? 11? It’s undefined, but there’s definitely an end date. Now, Capture One (for example) will import a Lr catalogue. By that they mean they’ll reference the image locations, make their own previews and convert <i><b>some </b></i>of the basic processing. Lr and C1 use different processing engines, so that’s understandable. C1 will not import/reference virtual copies/ variants, and they won’t import hierarchical keywords (https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003692438-Switching-from-Lightroom-to-Capture-One-FAQ)

Picture Instruments out of Germany has a Preset Converter  that will convert Lr presets into Capture One styles (I don’t use styles much), so a little while back I sent them a note suggesting that they develop software that does Lr library conversions. I didn’t hear back from them, but I believe there’s a market for it. The other day, however my friend sent me a link to another company (CYME) that has a program called Avalanche that converts file libraries from one software to another. They claim it will include all processing, metadata and virtual copies/ variants. Their latest update includes Luminar, although it doesn’t (yet) include Capture One. Unfortunately for my friend and me it’s currently Mac only so I have no experience with it. If it was available for Windows I’d definitely buy it. I’d only need to use it once, but that would be enough.

Mike.

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Mike Nelson Pedde
Victoria, BC
https://www.wolfnowl.com/

[Javier Santa Silver Member Posts: 10]

Re: Avalanche Library Converter

Reply #1 on: February 23, 2021 at 4:15 pm

I´ve been facing the same problem for quite a few years, and I´m still stuck with LR-6 perpetual.

It keeps me out of C-1 as I´m a bit tired of using more and more software that doesn´t speak to one another.

I´m frequently answered that I can have as many catalogs as I need in C-1, but I do browse pictures in my entire LR catalog by keywords and it´s really a pain to be browsing in many catalogs and then extracting all that images to have them together until I have the job done, then set it all again back to the origin.

I still don´t understand why C-1 has not take the time to do some kind of capable catalog yet.

A software intended for professionals and advanced amateurs will often deal with more than 100.000 images. Many more if you work in stock. No efforts are put in this, just in new features that seem to give the program more glamour.

Some software is doing it refering to the main catalog in your computer HD with thumbnails and accepting hyerarquical words

[Kevin Raber Silver Member Posts: 1311]

Re: Avalanche Library Converter

Reply #2 on: February 27, 2021 at 9:30 am

I have pretty good ins at Capture One and Phase One.  I was a VP there for 13 years.   I know they are aware of the catalog needs as they have certainly heard about it.  I use that catalog and it seems to work OK.  But I shoot in sessions then catalog the sessions once they are moved over to my RAID system,  The session advantage is that it is very portable so I can start out in the field on my laptop.  Come some and drag the session folder to my internal storage on my MacPro and do the work on files there.  Then when it hasn’t been used for a while I move it to the RAID system and there I open up this year’s catalog and catalog the session.  I have catalogs also built for locations that I frequently visit like Iceland, Death Valley, Yosemite, Antarctica, Greenland etc.  That’s how I use it and the catalogs work fine.  Some are quite large.

Kevin Raber
Owner and Publisher of photoPXL

[Mike Nelson Pedde Participant Posts: 641]

Re: Avalanche Library Converter

Reply #3 on: February 27, 2021 at 8:20 pm

Javier: There are some aspects of Lr and DAM that I miss in Capture One, but not enough to go back. One note, though that with C112 to 21 (at least, don’t remember before that) hierarchical keywords are accepted. Keyword files are just text files, so I don’t know why Capture One won’t import hierarchical keywords from Lr. Must have something to do with reading the Lr catalogue. The biggest reason for me (and my friend) to have a catalogue converter is that Capture One won’t import virtual copies (variants in Capture One). Actually, C1 will import them, and it will show you them in the browser, but it won’t do anything with them and won’t even display them in the viewer. Again, my coding days were a long time ago. I can see why Capture one might not to waste the time and resources on dealing with someone else’s software, but I still think there’s a market for it. Avalanche looks like a step in that direction, but Capture One isn’t (yet) supported and so far it’s Mac only.

Mike.

One challenge for me with Kevin’s method of sessions/catalogues is that I work a lot with keywords and sessions and catalogues have different keyword libraries. I could do culling, etc. in a session, but I’d have to do the keywording after importing to the catalogue (or spend a lot of time re-typing keywords into sessions).

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Mike Nelson Pedde
Victoria, BC
https://www.wolfnowl.com/

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