Add one variant to an album without automatically adding all other variants
Please make it possible to add one variant to an album without automatically adding all other variants of the same photo. This current behaviour is so obviously wrong.
It's marked as complete because that means that they are taking the suggestion into consideration, as described at the top of the Feature Requests forum.
Adding my voice to get this fixed in the hope this picks up attention again... No idea why this is marked as complete! I am an influencer and used Lightroom to develop quick social media versions of my photos with a 1:1 crop. I would use Lightroom's stacking feature to keep a series of posts together (and away from my other edits) for viewing, but since this is another feature C1 is lacking (image stacking) I assumed I could create variants and then just add them to a new album. Of course, all of my other photos come with me instead and I have to use a time consuming and frankly nonsensical/antithetical workaround like using keywords or color tags to simply organize my photos the way I want them.
C1, I love you, but the limited scope of photo organization tools and especially with how variants are implemented makes me miss my Adobe subscription more often than I was expecting. There is made worse by the fact that I can't even use the ideal work around and just duplicate images in C1? Like just create a copy of an image to work with? I have to use a variant or nothing at all. They are obviously a powerful tool and maybe many workflows don't care, but for others they are just confusing and frustratingly inflexible. A variant can still be a variant, but you should allow us to move them as though they were a photo. We are already able to tag and keyword them as such, so this restriction is confusing.
Since two years have passed, I'm interested in the status.
At the moment I am working as follows. I manually add images to a folder for printing. Sometimes I have several variants of an image because I want to compare color edits, for example. I now have to tag an image with a color tag and then only display the images in this folder for actual printing. I would like to save myself this "workflow".
Actually I don't understand you Grant, is this philosophy? :-)
An album is a container which you put things into. A smart album is a filter. A filter which can be stored as a property of an album is not a bad idea, if that is what you mean.
Grant, I assume you do not mean to abandon the smart album functionality i.e the dynamic set of variants based on filters. By all means this should not be removed...
The problem with making it a catalogue only feature might be that it breaks the current function relationship between catalogues and sessions is the corer rather than how the existing differences seem to be "reporting" differences.
I suspect that the effort required to simply split things would really result on 2 separate products.
A "smart" way to do it may in fact be very similar to what is already possible - just made to look different somehow.
The whole concept of "smart" anything is based on different presentations of what is already available not re-inventing another set of wheels. Maybe "Smart" should be abandoned?
I wonder whether the ease or otherwise of implementing this change depends partly on the way that Sessions are structured.
I don't use Lightroom, but I understand it to be catalog-based. Capture One can work with catalogs too, of course, but it also has sessions. In a session, all the data about the image edits is held in one .cos file for all variants of that image (except for masks, which are recorded in a separate .comask file). If it were to be possible (in a session) to put variants in separate albums, would that entail a restructuring of that scheme, with perhaps a separate .cos file for each variant? Could it become a feature that was only available for catalogs and not for sessions? Or is it easy enough to implement despite that current approach to .cos files?
"It would make much more sense to adopt the capabilities of Lightroom's virtual copies which are first-class images which just happen to share the raw data with an original image."
I completely agree.
The way variants currently work only exacerbates the lack of an option to save the adjustments of a photo (the settings at a specific point in the editing process) without saving a new variant – cf. Lightroom's snapshot function. I've made a request for such an option here.
The problem is that currently an image and all its variants are treated as a single entity so they either appear altogether or not at all. This implies the need for cumbersome and potentially inefficient workarounds that filter out the unwanted variants.
It would make much more sense to adopt the capabilities of Lightroom's virtual copies which are first-class images which just happen to share the raw data with an original image.
AFAIC, there need not be any distinction between original and (virtual) copy or variant. There should just be images and the ability to share raw data between images. The mechanics of creating variants could remain the same as they are now but variants should be separable. I believe it is already the case that none of the existing variants is special, they are all variants of each other with no need for one of them to be distinguished as the "original". The name may give away the variant generation but as the name should be changeable, that would in general only provide a non-permanent account of the variant history.
Moved from the archive on 16.05.23.
Implemented in v23 (16.0): The history of tools and features added to Capture One Pro.
It's marked as complete because that means that they are taking the suggestion into consideration, as described at the top of the Feature Requests forum.
Adding my voice to get this fixed in the hope this picks up attention again... No idea why this is marked as complete! I am an influencer and used Lightroom to develop quick social media versions of my photos with a 1:1 crop. I would use Lightroom's stacking feature to keep a series of posts together (and away from my other edits) for viewing, but since this is another feature C1 is lacking (image stacking) I assumed I could create variants and then just add them to a new album. Of course, all of my other photos come with me instead and I have to use a time consuming and frankly nonsensical/antithetical workaround like using keywords or color tags to simply organize my photos the way I want them.
C1, I love you, but the limited scope of photo organization tools and especially with how variants are implemented makes me miss my Adobe subscription more often than I was expecting. There is made worse by the fact that I can't even use the ideal work around and just duplicate images in C1? Like just create a copy of an image to work with? I have to use a variant or nothing at all. They are obviously a powerful tool and maybe many workflows don't care, but for others they are just confusing and frustratingly inflexible. A variant can still be a variant, but you should allow us to move them as though they were a photo. We are already able to tag and keyword them as such, so this restriction is confusing.
Since two years have passed, I'm interested in the status.
At the moment I am working as follows.
I manually add images to a folder for printing. Sometimes I have several variants of an image because I want to compare color edits, for example. I now have to tag an image with a color tag and then only display the images in this folder for actual printing. I would like to save myself this "workflow".
Are there any alternatives?
Thank you for your great feedback and the elaboration!
I will forward this feature request to our developers.
Best regards,
Jakob, Capture One
Agreed, Thomas.
Actually I don't understand you Grant, is this philosophy? :-)
An album is a container which you put things into. A smart album is a filter. A filter which can be stored as a property of an album is not a bad idea, if that is what you mean.
Regards
"Once "Smartness" is available the needs for structured or semi-structured data should become greatly reduced and ultimately irrelevant."
It should be possible to add individual variants to an album without – as a workaround – having to define a smart album that will do it for you.
Well, if "Smart" can be used for "Smart Albums" what stops it being used for other album requirements?
Once "Smartness" is available the needs for structured or semi-structured data should become greatly reduced and ultimately irrelevant.
Grant
Grant, I assume you do not mean to abandon the smart album functionality i.e the dynamic set of variants based on filters. By all means this should not be removed...
I give a vote for the original request.
Regards
I think you are right Ian3.
The problem with making it a catalogue only feature might be that it breaks the current function relationship between catalogues and sessions is the corer rather than how the existing differences seem to be "reporting" differences.
I suspect that the effort required to simply split things would really result on 2 separate products.
A "smart" way to do it may in fact be very similar to what is already possible - just made to look different somehow.
The whole concept of "smart" anything is based on different presentations of what is already available not re-inventing another set of wheels. Maybe "Smart" should be abandoned?
Grant
I wonder whether the ease or otherwise of implementing this change depends partly on the way that Sessions are structured.
I don't use Lightroom, but I understand it to be catalog-based. Capture One can work with catalogs too, of course, but it also has sessions. In a session, all the data about the image edits is held in one .cos file for all variants of that image (except for masks, which are recorded in a separate .comask file). If it were to be possible (in a session) to put variants in separate albums, would that entail a restructuring of that scheme, with perhaps a separate .cos file for each variant? Could it become a feature that was only available for catalogs and not for sessions? Or is it easy enough to implement despite that current approach to .cos files?
(I don't know - I am just wondering out loud.)
Ian
"It would make much more sense to adopt the capabilities of Lightroom's virtual copies which are first-class images which just happen to share the raw data with an original image."
I completely agree.
The way variants currently work only exacerbates the lack of an option to save the adjustments of a photo (the settings at a specific point in the editing process) without saving a new variant – cf. Lightroom's snapshot function. I've made a request for such an option here.
Agreed.
The problem is that currently an image and all its variants are treated as a single entity so they either appear altogether or not at all. This implies the need for cumbersome and potentially inefficient workarounds that filter out the unwanted variants.
It would make much more sense to adopt the capabilities of Lightroom's virtual copies which are first-class images which just happen to share the raw data with an original image.
AFAIC, there need not be any distinction between original and (virtual) copy or variant. There should just be images and the ability to share raw data between images. The mechanics of creating variants could remain the same as they are now but variants should be separable. I believe it is already the case that none of the existing variants is special, they are all variants of each other with no need for one of them to be distinguished as the "original". The name may give away the variant generation but as the name should be changeable, that would in general only provide a non-permanent account of the variant history.