It's very restrictive - and seemily extremely arbitrary - to not allow common symbols like the verical divider ( | ). I'm unable to use Sessions because all of my images that Sessions would pull from are stored in folders using " | ".
When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?
Every time I use C1 and import new photos.
Current workaround
Are you using any workarounds or other solutions to achieve your goals in Capture One?
I'm unable to use the C1 import functionality as all of my computer file organization uses the "|" symbol (example: 23/9 | Travel | Michigan)
11057524292637 First up, let's be very clear: I do NOT speak for Capture One. I'm a community mod. My purpose here is to try to tamp down spam bots and little else.
To kinda address the rest of your post, I'm going to refer you back to what I've said previously. An application can only allow in filenames and directory structure those characters allowed by the underlying operating system. Period. So if you want to use the | ("pipe") and Windows disallows that, your issue is with Microsoft. Not Capture One and not me. If you want to use some other look-alike character and it is allowed by the OS, cool. Knock yourself out. However, as a former IT guy with way too many years experience, I can tell you with some certainly that as soon as you send that file with the look-alike whatever to someone who is not familiar with it, you'll either have to explain to them how to work with that file or just let them try to figure it out.
So what's best practice? You have to decide that. Pilots and air traffic controllers have standardized on English as the standard for communications in radio traffic. To my knowledge, there is no such standardization in file and directory naming. However, I can say that, during my years wearing an IT hat, if a user brought me a filename that had a non-keyboard character in it (Unicode, ASCII, whatever), I'd immediately refer them back to the sender. Not worth my time to try to dig it out. So here we all are, on a community board, trying to find a way to do things better, faster, more efficiently and you're arguing about whether someone can use a Unicode character in a filename.
My PERSONAL answer and understanding that I IN NO WAY speak for Capture One is: sure, whatever the OS allows. Probably. Haven't tested every character and I'm not going to. HOWEVER, I don't think you should do that if you're in an environment where anyone you share that file with can't see the character on their keyboard. Because then you've pretty much killed any kind of efficient workflow. Note that I said "see the character on their keyboard". My son's overseas. ESL country. It's equally likely he sees filenames in non-Roman characters but never sees code in non-Roman characters. I've never really thought about it before this conversation but I think it probably has to do with audience. I don't know. Maybe that's something to ponder?
6938618439453 do you assert then, that Capture One should be restricted only to English-language users? I conclude this from the fact that the characters in question are part of standard language set for either Japanese or Chinese, so if they were not supported, this would imply either of these languages to be not supported by Capture One as well.
Considering that I have observed Unicode support to be broken, I would guess this is a semi-official statement that using Capture One with languages and scripts other than English is at least discouraged and my requests to fix functions not cooperating with Unicode will be denied, as there is no reason to provide support for nonexistent feature.
> Bradley Grochocinski: ...stored in folders using " | "
Just out of curiosity:
1) What operating system do you use?
2) Is the pipe symbol part of the folder name or is it the folder hierarchy separator?
Does your example 23/9 | Travel | Michigan mean a parent folder 23 and a sub-folder "9 | Travel | Michigan"? Or are "Travel" and "Michigan" a folder hierarchy with the pipe symbol acting as hierarchy level separator?
A Unix system or Unix-like system (like a Mac) will most likely accept a folder name containing a pipe character provided you escape it, as in \|
11057524292637 There's a difference between standard characters and allowed characters. You'll need to talk with Microsoft, Apple, etc for the latter. As to your standard characters, ask yourself this: If you pass that file to someone else, will they be able to work with it or will they see one of your 'standard characters' and bang away at the key on their keyboard wondering why things don't work like they expect or just kinda intuit that they've got to go al unicode on it?
Either way, | and \ and others are reserved by the various operating systems and further conversation here, at least on my part, has hit the point of diminishing returns.
There are two perspectives; is something allowed - or is it asking for trouble. Software is not free of bugs, and you don't even know today which software you'll be using tomorrow. That's where best practise comes in. I would like to use the dot (.) in folder or filenames but stay away from it for that reason.
These ARE standard and allowed characters and any problems in Capture One would be related to unicode support, not because they look like some other characters, as they are distinct by both shape and context - pipe character is NOT fullwidth vertical line and this is clearly reflected. It's like saying I (uppercase i) should not be used, because it looks like | (pipe), which is exaggerated, yet this visual difference is smaller than between ASCII and fullwidth versions made exactly with the substitution in mind, wherever the original would be not appropriate.
11057524292637 Take 381975022417's advice and just don't go there. There are plenty of standard characters available. People who try to push boundaries like this on fundamentals like file and directory structures inevitably come up against some application or new release of the OS that really just expects you to play by the rules. And then, poof. All your files are just gone. Now you're spending hours, days, weeks trying to recover from something that is, in all honesty, completely self-inflicted.
5238816839197. Not sure if you caught the above but do yourself a favor and stay away from any but basic characters. Letters, numbers, hyphen, underscore. If you want to get exotic, look up allowed character lists for your OS. Then look up allowed character lists for all the other operating systems your application runs on. The intersection of those sets will be the only characters you can safely use.
I wouldn't personally recommend using look-alike characters because if you're ever trying to use those filenames in some other context, particularly a command line context where you have to type the filename and you don't realize that those are some other look-alike character, you may have difficulty using those filenames. Dash and underscore have served me just fine when I want some type of separator in the filename.
Use fullwidth characters like ｜／＼, they are allowed on all systems and look about the same.
Edit: there are many illegal naming cases that can be somehow created on any system, for example I had to fight recently several empty folders of unknown provenience with names ending with a space, which is forbidden; only DOS 8.3 workaround was able to get rid of them. Don't play with fire, conform to rules.
To add to what Brian said, image filenames or folder names can only contain characters which are allowed by the host OS. This is not under Capture One's control - this is dictated by the underlying operating system. On Windows, the | character (known as the pipe character) is not allowed in filenames.
I can't speak for what is and isn't allowed on Mac, but Capture One is likely trying to limit you to characters that are legal on BOTH Windows and Mac so that sessions or catalogs can be transported between operating systems if necessary.
A safe, reliable solution would be for you to rename the folders or images that contain the | character and change it to something like a - which is a legal filename character in Capture One (or pick some other symbol that is allowed).
I would counter that Capture One should not accept directories containing the | character because then it could create cross platform issues, which once things are embedded in a session or catalog are much more difficult to fix.
That character is disallowed at the OS level. Windows flatly says NO. MacOS interprets it almost like the \. In short, don’t use it. 23-09 works perfectly well.
Edit to add: that | symbol you’re using is also a disallowed character. Dates back to DOS days when it was referred to as “pipe”. You might dir a: | prn which would print a directory of the a drive (if I remember my syntax correctly). It may be working for you but you are playing with fire. All my years as a developer and sys engineer screams “NOOOOOOOOOOOO”.
11057524292637 First up, let's be very clear: I do NOT speak for Capture One. I'm a community mod. My purpose here is to try to tamp down spam bots and little else.
To kinda address the rest of your post, I'm going to refer you back to what I've said previously. An application can only allow in filenames and directory structure those characters allowed by the underlying operating system. Period. So if you want to use the | ("pipe") and Windows disallows that, your issue is with Microsoft. Not Capture One and not me. If you want to use some other look-alike character and it is allowed by the OS, cool. Knock yourself out. However, as a former IT guy with way too many years experience, I can tell you with some certainly that as soon as you send that file with the look-alike whatever to someone who is not familiar with it, you'll either have to explain to them how to work with that file or just let them try to figure it out.
So what's best practice? You have to decide that. Pilots and air traffic controllers have standardized on English as the standard for communications in radio traffic. To my knowledge, there is no such standardization in file and directory naming. However, I can say that, during my years wearing an IT hat, if a user brought me a filename that had a non-keyboard character in it (Unicode, ASCII, whatever), I'd immediately refer them back to the sender. Not worth my time to try to dig it out. So here we all are, on a community board, trying to find a way to do things better, faster, more efficiently and you're arguing about whether someone can use a Unicode character in a filename.
My PERSONAL answer and understanding that I IN NO WAY speak for Capture One is: sure, whatever the OS allows. Probably. Haven't tested every character and I'm not going to. HOWEVER, I don't think you should do that if you're in an environment where anyone you share that file with can't see the character on their keyboard. Because then you've pretty much killed any kind of efficient workflow. Note that I said "see the character on their keyboard". My son's overseas. ESL country. It's equally likely he sees filenames in non-Roman characters but never sees code in non-Roman characters. I've never really thought about it before this conversation but I think it probably has to do with audience. I don't know. Maybe that's something to ponder?
6938618439453 do you assert then, that Capture One should be restricted only to English-language users? I conclude this from the fact that the characters in question are part of standard language set for either Japanese or Chinese, so if they were not supported, this would imply either of these languages to be not supported by Capture One as well.
Considering that I have observed Unicode support to be broken, I would guess this is a semi-official statement that using Capture One with languages and scripts other than English is at least discouraged and my requests to fix functions not cooperating with Unicode will be denied, as there is no reason to provide support for nonexistent feature.
> Bradley Grochocinski: ...stored in folders using " | "
Just out of curiosity:
1) What operating system do you use?
2) Is the pipe symbol part of the folder name or is it the folder hierarchy separator?
Does your example 23/9 | Travel | Michigan mean a parent folder 23 and a sub-folder "9 | Travel | Michigan"? Or are "Travel" and "Michigan" a folder hierarchy with the pipe symbol acting as hierarchy level separator?
A Unix system or Unix-like system (like a Mac) will most likely accept a folder name containing a pipe character provided you escape it, as in \|
11057524292637 There's a difference between standard characters and allowed characters. You'll need to talk with Microsoft, Apple, etc for the latter. As to your standard characters, ask yourself this: If you pass that file to someone else, will they be able to work with it or will they see one of your 'standard characters' and bang away at the key on their keyboard wondering why things don't work like they expect or just kinda intuit that they've got to go al unicode on it?
Either way, | and \ and others are reserved by the various operating systems and further conversation here, at least on my part, has hit the point of diminishing returns.
There are two perspectives; is something allowed - or is it asking for trouble. Software is not free of bugs, and you don't even know today which software you'll be using tomorrow. That's where best practise comes in. I would like to use the dot (.) in folder or filenames but stay away from it for that reason.
These ARE standard and allowed characters and any problems in Capture One would be related to unicode support, not because they look like some other characters, as they are distinct by both shape and context - pipe character is NOT fullwidth vertical line and this is clearly reflected. It's like saying I (uppercase i) should not be used, because it looks like | (pipe), which is exaggerated, yet this visual difference is smaller than between ASCII and fullwidth versions made exactly with the substitution in mind, wherever the original would be not appropriate.
11057524292637 Take 381975022417's advice and just don't go there. There are plenty of standard characters available. People who try to push boundaries like this on fundamentals like file and directory structures inevitably come up against some application or new release of the OS that really just expects you to play by the rules. And then, poof. All your files are just gone. Now you're spending hours, days, weeks trying to recover from something that is, in all honesty, completely self-inflicted.
5238816839197. Not sure if you caught the above but do yourself a favor and stay away from any but basic characters. Letters, numbers, hyphen, underscore. If you want to get exotic, look up allowed character lists for your OS. Then look up allowed character lists for all the other operating systems your application runs on. The intersection of those sets will be the only characters you can safely use.
I wouldn't personally recommend using look-alike characters because if you're ever trying to use those filenames in some other context, particularly a command line context where you have to type the filename and you don't realize that those are some other look-alike character, you may have difficulty using those filenames. Dash and underscore have served me just fine when I want some type of separator in the filename.
Use fullwidth characters like ｜／＼, they are allowed on all systems and look about the same.
Edit: there are many illegal naming cases that can be somehow created on any system, for example I had to fight recently several empty folders of unknown provenience with names ending with a space, which is forbidden; only DOS 8.3 workaround was able to get rid of them. Don't play with fire, conform to rules.
To add to what Brian said, image filenames or folder names can only contain characters which are allowed by the host OS. This is not under Capture One's control - this is dictated by the underlying operating system. On Windows, the | character (known as the pipe character) is not allowed in filenames.
I can't speak for what is and isn't allowed on Mac, but Capture One is likely trying to limit you to characters that are legal on BOTH Windows and Mac so that sessions or catalogs can be transported between operating systems if necessary.
A safe, reliable solution would be for you to rename the folders or images that contain the | character and change it to something like a - which is a legal filename character in Capture One (or pick some other symbol that is allowed).
I would counter that Capture One should not accept directories containing the | character because then it could create cross platform issues, which once things are embedded in a session or catalog are much more difficult to fix.
That character is disallowed at the OS level. Windows flatly says NO. MacOS interprets it almost like the \. In short, don’t use it. 23-09 works perfectly well.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=front%20slash%20in%20filenames
Edit to add: that | symbol you’re using is also a disallowed character. Dates back to DOS days when it was referred to as “pipe”. You might dir a: | prn which would print a directory of the a drive (if I remember my syntax correctly). It may be working for you but you are playing with fire. All my years as a developer and sys engineer screams “NOOOOOOOOOOOO”.