Catalog size after removing images

[HansB]

Hi everybody.


After using a quite big referenced catalog (20GB, 6 years of images) for a while, I decided to clean it up and make it leaner. So I removed about 80% of the content. I got rid of the images in the C1 browser, but surprise: the catalog size didn't shrink! Still 20GB.

To reproduce it I...
1) created a referenced catalog with just 4 images. I used images on a USB drive, just like in the 'real' catalog.
2) removed 2 of the images. They were removed from displayed images in the image browser.
3) used finder, looked with 'show package contents' into the *.cocoatalog file. Result: .cof and .cop files were still in the 'cache' folder.
4) re-add the 2 files previously removed.
5) removed them again.
6) used finder, looked with 'show package contents' into the *.cocoatalog file. Result: these .cof and .cop files were now left twice in different folders within the 'cache' folder.
...) can be repeated.
(Re-opening the catalog, restarting C1 or Mac at any point, trashing or keeping image files doesn't change behavior.)

So removing images from a catalog leaves a lot of garbage, eating up disk space. I found up to 4 Mbyte per image. All .cof and .cop files ever created are in there, from all ever removed images.

Forever? Why? Is there a way to clean it up?


Best regards,
Hans-B.

[mli20]

I believe you just need to backup your catalog, with the "Optimize Catalog" option checked.

Edit: Just checked myself; disk space recovered was less than expected...I don't think that a radical clean-up can be done from within Capture One.

Cheers,
Mogens

[HansB]

Backing it up - with optimizing - didn't show any effect on the 20GB catalog. And, I just checked it, it has no effect on the contents on my test catalog. All .cof and .cop from removed images are still there, and there is no change in size.


Best regards,
Hans-B.

[sizzlingbadger]

It is a cache so may only get cleaned up periodically, or maybe once it reaches a certain size.

[HansB]

An important update on this item.

I filed a support request on this and P1 confirmed that files like *.cof and *.cop remain in the *.cocatalog. It's now up to P1's R&D to solve it.

By the way, other files, like *.comask, are left in there, too. Just in different folders.


Best regards,
Hans-B.

[HansB]

Another update.

I wrote a python script to clean up the garbage. (Thanks to stackoverflow for some useful code snippets.)
But I hope C1 will do the cleanup by itself in future.


Best regards,
Hans-B.

[HansB]

New version update:

There is a new C1 version: 8.0. And it now cleans up the catalogs when deleting images.

Deleting images from my referenced catalogs now decreases the catalog size accordingly. Only the empty folder structure is still left in. But this doesn't eat up disk space. I am using my script to get rid of them, to have a really clean catalog.


Best regards,
Hans-B.

[meanwhile]

Thanks for following this up Hans. Wondering, does it cleanup files that are already deleted, or only files deleted since v8?