Transferring a MP catalog into C1

[Ian3]

In view of the announcement today that Media Pro is being discontinued ( ) can anyone share their experiences of transferring a MP catalog into Capture One? In particular I wonder what happens to

- hierarchical keywords
- Place Finder entries
- People entries

Do I have to create keywords to correspond to my people and places to get them into the C1 catalog in a format that can easily be searched?

Ian

[Ian3]

Answering some of my own questions (after a brief test import of a small MP catalog into a new C1 catalog)

- Places information seems to be imported as IPTC image information AND (which is a good thing) the C1 Filters tool can filter by Place, using that data. So I can use the Filter tool to find all the images from the Bedminster area of Bristol, for example.

- The keywords that I created as hierarchical keywords in MP are read across into C1, but I can't see whether they are available in some hierarchical way. So an image that had the hierarchical keywords Bird > Duck > Mandarin duck, for instance seems to have all those keywords added to it, but I can't seem them displayed hierarchically, as far as I can see. Or am I missing something?

- People information doesn't seem to be read across at all.

Help, please!

Ian

[IanL]

I am not in front of my image editing computer so I cannot post screen shots but the keyword select / search UI includes the hierarchy with an expandable and collapsible tree. Once you select various keywords for an image they do not appear in a hierarchy just a flat list.

[Ian3]

I am not in front of my image editing computer so I cannot post screen shots but the keyword select / search UI includes the hierarchy with an expandable and collapsible tree. Once you select various keywords for an image they do not appear in a hierarchy just a flat list.

Yes I know you can create a hierarchy in C1, but the question is whether the hierarchical keywords from MP come into C1 as flat or hierarchical.

Ian

[syncrasy]

{Sad day for Media Pro users. But we all saw it coming}

Ian, I hope you are able to work in C1. I also keep animal/species hierarchical keywords so I'll be following this thread. I have no immediate plans to go to C1 because of all the complaints about C1 catalogs. I plan to keep MP running on a Mac partition for the foreseeable future. (Of course, when I buy a new camera, then the end of life becomes reality for me.)

I don't know if this is relevant, but I found this note in the C1 v11 online User Guide:

"Hierarchical keywords are displayed in the Keywords tool UI as a flat list but retain their hierarchical relationship in the Keyword Library. To see the relationship, mouse over the keyword in the Keywords tool to get tool tip showing the full path."

https://help.phaseone.com/en/CO11/Organizing-Photos/Metadata/Keywords.aspx

Or did you already use the the mouse/hover technique in the C1 "Keywords tool UI" to check for your imported MP hierarchies?

[Ian3]

Ian, I hope you are able to work in C1. I also keep animal/species hierarchical keywords so I'll be following this thread. I have no immediate plans to go to C1 because of all the complaints about C1 catalogs. I plan to keep MP running on a Mac partition for the foreseeable future. (Of course, when I buy a new camera, then the end of life becomes reality for me.)

I use C1 anyway for my editing. One of the advantages of MP was the (sort of) integration with C1 - so edits done in C1 are reflected in the display in the MP catalog. I want to use C1 for editing, so it will be a case of using a C1 catalog, I suppose, if I am not to lose that. There is no urgency, as obviously MP will continue to work for now, but it may not survive any OS update, and presumably won't honour edits made in later versions of C1. C1 catalogs are allegedly getting better, so perhaps in v12 they will be better again! And there are some downsides to MP's relationship to C1 - for example it only displays the primary variant of an image, whereas if I had more than one variant of an image in C1 they would all be shown in the C1 catalog.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I found this note in the C1 v11 online User Guide:

"Hierarchical keywords are displayed in the Keywords tool UI as a flat list but retain their hierarchical relationship in the Keyword Library. To see the relationship, mouse over the keyword in the Keywords tool to get tool tip showing the full path."

https://help.phaseone.com/en/CO11/Organizing-Photos/Metadata/Keywords.aspx

Or did you already use the the mouse/hover technique in the C1 "Keywords tool UI" to check for your imported MP hierarchies?

I have checked again. I had created a smaller MP catalog of just my images from 2018 so far, then used that to create a C1 catalog as a test. All the keywords for images have been transferred but not as a hierarchy. So an image that in MP had the hierarchical keywords Bird>Duck>Northern Pintail has the keywords Bird, Duck and Northern Pintail, but they appear separately in the keyword library, not hierarchically.

Thanks.

Ian

[syncrasy]

I have checked again. I had created a smaller MP catalog of just my images from 2018 so far, then used that to create a C1 catalog as a test. All the keywords for images have been transferred but not as a hierarchy. So an image that in MP had the hierarchical keywords Bird>Duck>Northern Pintail has the keywords Bird, Duck and Northern Pintail, but they appear separately in the keyword library, not hierarchically.

Okay, I figured you had checked. At this point I think we should demand that Phase One bring C1 into better parity with MP to handle our MP catalogs properly. I mean, for crying out loud, they have owned Media Pro for over 8 years now. What's the point in purchasing (and then killing) such a fine DAM if they can't integrate the best bits of code and/or provide a proper migration into their own software? To that end, I've started a new thread in the Capture One 11 forum called "Media Pro refugees: What are our DAM demands?" I added the hierarchy problem as the first migration issue. Feel free to add/contribute to the thread.

[IanL]

I have checked again. I had created a smaller MP catalog of just my images from 2018 so far, then used that to create a C1 catalog as a test. All the keywords for images have been transferred but not as a hierarchy. So an image that in MP had the hierarchical keywords Bird>Duck>Northern Pintail has the keywords Bird, Duck and Northern Pintail, but they appear separately in the keyword library, not hierarchically.

I didn't create my C1 catalogue from MP but form LR. What I did was export my keywords from LR and import them in C1 then I imported the contents of my LR catalogue.

That way I was able to verify my keyword hierarchy before the image import.

That import resulted in the keyword hierarchy that I expected. So, C1 can definitely import a hierarchical keyword library and use it.

[roberte]

Media Pro uses the Adobe XMP namespace for hierarchical keywords, implemented by its previous owners. It can sometimes be flakey losing its hierarchy.

If some metadata fields don't map to Capture ONE Pro you can transfer them to IPTC fields before moving to C1. Whether that's by drag and drop or via AppleScript/VB Script. That's what I did with Media Pro Catalog Sets when I moved to Lightroom.

I won't be using Capture One 11 for DAM as it's database is not robust. As pretty as the raw conversions are C1 catalogs are too slow and lacking extensibility. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

[Ian3]

I won't be using Capture One 11 for DAM as it's database is not robust. As pretty as the raw conversions are C1 catalogs are too slow and lacking extensibility. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Of course, we can hope for further enhancements to C1's catalog capabilities when the next version comes out. But Phase One's policy would not be to announce anything like that in advance.

Ian

[Steven142]

This has been a bit of a nightmare. I have 31k images in MP. On import to C1, about 2k failed to import, don't know what to do about that. The C1 catalog thus far is useless. I can't find any way to make C1 show the keyword list of tags from MP, so I have imported photos I can't use. Not clear C1 could make a list at all. Every time I open C1, it goes to sessions, then crashes on loading the catalog . I let the sync of metadata activity run a couple days, then just forced quit.

Has anyone had this import actually work? Does C1 actually have a keyword list like MP I can drag photos to? Given C1 got it's catalog piece from MP, I would have thought they would have updated C1 so this could work...

[RobiWan]

This has been a bit of a nightmare.
...
...
Has anyone had this import actually work?

Which OS do you have? OSX or Windows?
And yes C1 Cataloging is nightmare now

[Ian3]

I have been importing my MP catalog into C1. I thought that doing the whole thing at once might be difficult. So I copied images from MP into a new MP catalog per year, and imported those one at a time into C1. Keywords that I had assigned in MP remain attached to the images in C!, but I am having to rearrange the hierarchy as that has not carried across. I read a post somewhere from a user who had trouble with crashing when dragging keywords to be child keywords. So what I have done is create a new empty C1 catalog, and I am working on my keyword library in that. (It will be available to all sessions and catalogs, so I thought that it might be quicker and safer that way. I am now away for a few days so I can't yet check the outcome.)

Ian

[Steven142]

This has been a bit of a nightmare.
...
...
Has anyone had this import actually work?

Which OS do you have? OSX or Windows?
And yes C1 Cataloging is nightmare now

I am using Mac OS up to date, latest C1. At this time, C1 no longer runs, just spinning beach ball.

[RobiWan]

I am using Mac OS up to date, latest C1. At this time, C1 no longer runs, just spinning beach ball.

OSX - that is great.
Here is how I proceeded:

!!!!! Create Backup !!!!
1. Be sure, that your catalog has no problems (run verify/ repair catalog)
2. Remove all Metadata from your catalog
3. Deactivate - Metadata Syncing in C1

4. Write all annotations in Media Pro into XMP files
5. Create smart albums in C1 - as example (years)
6. select all images for one year and select "load Metadata"

!!! After each year close C1 and start it again !!! - this because C1 has memory issue and its possible to crash if you try import to much metadata at once.