Search and Filtering in Capture One

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.