Search and Filtering in Capture One
December 1, 2011 9 Comments
The Search and Filtering functionality in Capture One 6 is an often overlooked feature. Learn how to use it, and you will find it to be a very powerful tool that can help you improve your everyday workflow.
You can search among your images in any selected Image Folder or Album; or you can search among all the images in all the folders associated with a Session.
Searching a selected Image Folder can be done with a simple free text search or by setting up multiple specific search criteria. A free text search will match the search text with the context of more than 50 search criteria within Metadata and file names.
To show the result of search criteria applied to all the images in a Session, Capture One 6 uses Smart Albums. Smart Albums are dynamically updated and will therefore always show the latest search results.
The dynamic nature of Smart Albums make them very useful for workflow related search and filtering. By default, a new Session includes a Smart Album named “Five Star Images”. This Smart Album will always show all 5-star rated images in a Session. Immediate after rating a new image with 5 stars, it will also be visible in the “Five Star Images” Smart Album.
Searching within a folder: To enter the search setup dialogue box, click the search magnifier icon, above the thumbnail browser as shown above (if Capture One’s thumbnail browser is placed to the right of your screen, you may need to click again on the magnifier in the small search dialogue to get the larger search box)
Selecting images:
In my workflow, I use the Smart Albums in the process of selecting which images from a shoot I would like to work with.
First, I create a new Session for my shoot. When using the Search and Filtering options, I can search among all the images in this Session except those in the Trash Folder.
Then, I set up an extra Smart Album for holding my 4 and 5 star rated images.
The image above shows the search criteria for finding all images rated with 4 or 5 stars (using one of the preset criteria). To extend the search to all images in the Session, press the “Create Smart Album” button.
When browsing through my image folders, I use the keyboard shortcuts to rate the images with stars. I only rate the images with 3, 4 or 5 stars, and I am not extremely methodical when rating, as I will complete the rating in at least 2 steps. In the first round of rating, it is not too important if I initially rate a 5-star image with only 4 stars or the other way around.
Next, I select the Smart Album containing all my 4 and 5 star rated images. Now, I have isolated the best images from the shoot and it becomes much easier to reevaluate the images in a second round of selection to really nail down the best 5 star images.
When I am done rating, all the images I want to work with are placed in the default Smart Album called “Five Star Images”.
In the Library Tool under Session Albums, you can see the list of Smart Albums and normal Albums created for the Session. Note that the icon for a Smart Album differs from the normal Album icon by the addition of a small cog-wheel in the lower right corner of the icon.
Separate Variants:
Smart Albums can also be used to separate variants. This can be a big advantage if you want to show a client images from a shoot in a series with the same look or style applied. I use it quite often to separate Black and White image variants from the Color variants.
Here I have generated 2 variants of the same image; one of them converted into Black and White. In order to separate the color version from the Black and White version, I have color tagged the Black and White version with Purple
An easy way to do this is by associating a specific color tag to those variants I want as Black and White images. I typically use the last color in the color tag list (Purple) as it is easy to select from the drop-down list and it still allows me to use Yellow and Green for tagging my final selects.
Here I have selected the Smart Album named BW. This Album is set up to find all Purple tagged images. As you can see only the BW variants are visible in this Smart Album.
Using color tags to separate the BW variants is just one way of doing it. Another method could be to add the keyword “BW” to the Black and White variants and set up a Smart Album containing all images with “BW” in the Keywords. This solution requires a little more work, but will free up the color tags for further selection possibilities.
To this day, I still have no idea on how to use albums and sessions. I have not found a fellow professional photographer who can show me since we’re all still using folders and directories. We bought media pro 1 hoping it would make our workflow easier but the task of right clicking and hovering and clicking again to switch between media pro and capture one is counterproductive.
We put up with all of this because Capture One still produces the best raw conversion, hands down.
I fully agree with Mark. C1 is superb for processing my images (especially since I have a Phase One back
), but the concepts of sessions and albums are somewhat messy. What might help is a blog post on what Phase One’s vision around the session and album concept is and how we could use it in the flow. And I don’t mean “Press button X and tata, there’s an album”, but a clear explanation on what the idea is on a conceptual level and then how that translates to us mere users. 
Love the processing though, since moving to the back with C1, I’m using photoshop a lot less!
I suggest a series of examples on how sessions and albums are used in real workflows.
It could be 2-3 proofed cases, explained by their creators.
The system gain by using albums is of course, that each collection is definded by pointers saving disk space and preventing inconsistence problems.
Next is how to use the concept in the best possible way.
Two or three practical excamples would be nice.
And please do NOT turn Capture One into an asset-managing-tool like e.g. Lightroom.
Actually a plug-in version for Photoshop would be much more interesting.
Keep CO as a raw-converter, simple and smart regarding the basic capture features.
Thanks for your tips. I never used this features before but now
Thanks for your comments – we really appreciate the input.
We’ll look into how we can make the concept of working in Sessions more clear, and perhaps, we’ll do some more blog posts on it in the new year.
Until then, you can check out the other posts on this blog about Sessions: http://blog.phaseone.com/tag/sessions/ or take a look at the tutorial on our website: http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Capture-One-Pro-6/Pro-Tutorials.aspx
All the best,
Niels
I’m new @C1 – working for two years now and still didn’t get the idea of these filters etc. Stars and color tags are classic, it’s very easy to use these while you’re in current session, current date. There’s no chance to find these pictures 9 months later using existing search and filter modules. For me the best way would be to tag each session image by selecting either one or all of them and setting the keywords like meat, grill, party, beach etc and then simply search these keywords later using either current session or all content in specific directory.
I have used Lightroom a lot, and I also had a tap into Aperture.
Albums are pretty much like collections in LR, and I do use them a lot. I wish there were several levels, like collection sets in LR, which allows better organization. Albums free you from actual physical locations on the hard drive, but where LR relies on a catalog to link actual files to references, C1 needs sessions to do the same, although sessions are much more limited and slower than LR catalogs. I don’t agree with Eigil: if C1 could find a way to seemlessly embed cataloging from Media Pro and provide rich search and filtering capabilities like LR, combined with currently C1 raw processor, I would be so happy. For the moment, everytime I’m searching for pictures with keywords taken with an 85mm lens, at a certain GPS location accross all my entire library, I must switch to every session I have, while I can do it lightning fast and easy in LR. Although I love C1 raw processing, I really appreciate LR cataloging and advanced keyword management.
Hi Antoine,
Thank you for your input on how to improve Capture One in terms of cataloging and keyword management. We are always looking for ways to improve Capture One and we’ll add your feedback to the things that we are looking into.
All the best,
Niels
In fact, I guess the concept of session related to a job/assignment comes from the origins of C1, which is a companion for Phase One cameras.
Those cameras are used a lot for commercials made in studio or related to a specific job, so it makes sense to have a “session-based” philosophy.
Other cameras or other type of shooters may think broader, using an entire library or archive which provides their images. For instance, at any time, stock shooters may need to start a retrieval of pictures based on whatever metadata in order to fulfill a client request, rework them in some way then output and deliver those images to their client or stock agency. It would make sense to not have to enter every session just to be able to filter or search their images (granted that the photographer uses to use session, which is not always my case !).