I just discovered that I can get a student discount and for capture 1 it's 65%. I have the photographers package with adobe, and rarely use PS. The student discount there gives you everything so not point me taking that and the price is much higher than just taking C1.
What was unusable about the catalogue? It's the bit I really like about LR and could prevent me from switching more than anything
I've been using a C1 catalogue for over a year now, and it's OK. Note: C1 introduced Catalogues with version 7. I have used it since version 6 (we are now at Version 16, but the numbers haven't increased annually).
The C1 approach to probably every aspect of managing the catalogue is different to LR, and overall it's just a bit clunkier, Every other aspect of C1, I by far prefer over LR but the catalogue has been a disaster, and for years I have run a LR catalogue while using C1 sessions (see below) for image processing.
Overall it's not as good (slower searches) or as easy to use as a LR catalogue. BUT it does some things noticeably better, ie scrolling through large numbers of thumbnails is faster in C1 than LR, but searching is faster in LR. Lots of minor differences beyond that, which are neither better or worse, just different, and depending on my mood, I change my mind over which approach to individual tasks I prefer.
In the past everything was slow with the C1 catalogue (even moving to an M1 Mac, didn't make the difference I was hoping for) and after a few weeks of using a catalogue, it would corrupt, and the backups "never" imported properly.
Every time the C1 release notes said they had improved the catalogue, I tried it again and never found it any better until about 18 months ago. Since then It's been working fine (50,000 files). It still doesn't feel as "robust" as LR, but I have had no issues since dumping my LR catalogue a year ago.
Even when I was having problems, other people with very large catalogues (250,000 images plus) seemed to be happy with the catalogue, while others, like me, found it a disaster, but it seems good enough now.
As an aside, C1 has traditionally used "Sessions". which are sort of like stand-alone catalogues, and assumes the photographer organises their photographs by project. You create a new session for every project, and every system folder related to that project is managed by the C1 session. When the project ends and the photographs have been delivered, ie an advertisng campaign, a wedding, a portrait. a football match, an expedition to the Andes etc, C1 allows you archive the session (including all raws, final images, drafts etc) into a chosen location for safe keeping.
Sessions are fast and remarkably stable, but you cannot search across sessions**. However, you can have multiple sessions open at the same time. This makes it a great approach for project-based work, but not much use if you are, for example. a wildlife photographer who wants to search across all your files for a particular bird species in a particular habitat or location.
The C1 catalogue interface is based around one of the best DAMs ever made, Media pro, which I used decades ago, This was a British DAM, sold to Microsoft, and then later bought by Phase One (when Phase One and Capture One were the same company). Initially, Phase One integrated C1 sessions into Media Pro, which I found brilliant, it allowed the stability and organisation of sessions, but with the sessions fully searchable from within Media Pro.
But Media Pro was written in an obsolete programming language, which Apple were going to stop supporting, and instead of re-writing Media Pro, they simply stole some aspects of its GUI to put into Capture One, and wrote a backend in SQLite (also used by LR), which according to some database programmers who have looked "behind the scenes" wasn't written very well. Hopefully, this has improved over the years.
** PeakTo, a third party Digoital asset management tool allows searching across multiple sessions where it also shows the C1 edits, as does Neofinder (but it doesn't show the edits). And you can create a C1 catalogue of sessions, but this gets confusing as you can now edit in either the catalogue or the session and the changes aren't shared. Finally, you can import the session into a C1 catalogue as part of the archiving process, as long as you no longer edit the session. This isn't as confusing as it sounds and adds a fair bit of flexibility to your workflow options.
If I was starting again, I would go back to using Sessions along with PeakTo to catalogue them.
www.captureone.com
