1. Capture One 21 Book
2. Capture One 21 Tnt

I really wanted the Affinity/Capture One combo to work out. I actually like the results I'm getting with Capture One vs Lightroom (especially for my Fuji X-Pro2) and Affinity Photo does what I need. But after the ridiculous v21 'upgrade', with all its unwarranted hype, this is the final straw I'm afraid. From the CO1 v21 release notes: ' ProStandard camera profiles Capture One 21 introduces a new type of camera profiles that render colors more naturally. The profiles have multiple purposes: Better preservation of color across contrast gradients, resulting in more natural colors from shadows to highlights. Capture One has released a next day Service Release for their newest release, Capture One 21 (14.0.0). Please scan the KNOWN ISSUES section before upgrading or posting: Click here to read the full post on the newest release. Capture One 21 (14.0.1) is a service release for Mac and Windows including: Bug fixes. New camera support. New lens support.

I initially subscribed to CaptureOne for a monthly fee as I wasn't sure I wanted to move from one subscription service to another and I noticed that BH sells perpetual licenses for v20 for $200 (they also sell perpetual v21 licenses for the regular price). I read several reviews and many people weren't convinced that v21 is a worthy upgrade so.

I switched over to Capture One Pro from Lightroom (version 6, perpetual license) two years ago, when version 11 was current. While I enjoy Capture One’s RAW editing and conversion prowess, good media management is not its strength and this adds an overhead to my overall workflow. So where exactly does Capture One Pro lag behind Lightroom?¹

Lightroom² gets the basics of file management right in its implementation of a Catalog. When photos are ingested, Lightroom automatically creates a nested Year-Date folder hierarchy, based on the capture date of the photos. This organization works wonderfully well for all kinds of scenarios:

1. A shoot that lasted several days? No problem, each day is its own folder under the parent folder for the shoot.
2. A shoot that must be maintained separately? Just create a new catalog for only that shoot.
3. Annual family vacations? Again, no problem! Different years(and days) are neatly organized under a root - think of a Thanksgiving folder, with subfolders for each year 2016, 2017, 2018 and so on. These in turn have their own subfolders for each day (see point 1).

Capture One 21 Book

This is the folder hierarchy that Lightroom creates:

All this is to say that Lightroom creates a folder hierarchy on disk that is sensible, easy to understand and doesn’t need any manual maintenance on the part of the user. It just works.

Capture One Pro, on the other hand, simply dumps all photos into a target folder³. There is no organization of photos within this folder. While this is somewhat passable for the first two use cases described above, it completely falls apart for the third. My vacation photos from several years for an annual event get all muddled together into a single folder. The only way around this then is to create Smart Albums, a cumbersome and non-scalable overhead.

The approach I’ve adopted is to maintain photographs manually. I cull photos outside of Capture One, create folders for them on the external drive⁴ and copy photos over. In Capture One, these photos are imported ‘in place’ i.e. simply added to the catalog without moving them over.

But there is a fly in the ointment. Lightroom’s killer feature is its ability to read files from subfolders. In other words when I select the folder Thanksgiving in the catalog, Lightroom shows photos from all thanksgiving holidays over the years. Select the folder for a particular shoot, and it shows photos from all days that the shoot lasted for.

Capture One doesn’t have this ‘feature’⁵. Were I to point Capture One to a folder hierarchy similar to the one in Lightroom and select the folder Thanksgiving, nothing would happen - there are no photos in this folder itself, they are all in subfolders. My only recourse⁶ is to flatten the hierarchy out i.e. create a folder with a name that is descriptive enough to indicate what photos it contains and when they were taken.

So what I have ended up with now is this:

Capture One 21 Tnt

Compare this with the beautiful structure Lightroom creates.

The fact that over 3 versions (11, 12 and now 20) there have been no improvements (or even changes) to catalog management is disappointing. Hopefully, Phase One is listening and has something in the works for v21.

1. In the area of DAM ↩︎
2. Having never used the Creative Cloud version, aka The-New-Lightroom, I’m unclear on whether this kind of organization extends to it as well. ↩︎
3. Capture One has something called Sessions, which create a simple hierarchy of folders, but aren’t really suited for maintaining a large library ↩︎
4. Where my photo library resides ↩︎
5. Thick quotes. I can’t imagine this is too difficult for Phase One to either implement. Would this break anybody’s workflow? I can’t think of a scenario. ↩︎
6. Short of creating the folders manually and copying everything into the right one (by date!). ↩︎