Long before catalogs were as popular as they are now in photo editing software, Capture One had sessions available to help photographers organize their photoshoots. Based on the thought behind tethering, each session is a different photoshoot, filled with a series of files from your camera.
Sessions let users stay organized through four sub-folders to the session — Capture, Output, Selects and Trash. These work hand-in-hand with tethering sessions, with Capture keeping all the photos from the tethering session, Selects holding the files you want to edit, Output as the destination for images that have been processed and Trash, which holds the photos that are deleted.
Sessions allow you to follow a step-by-step process with your editing workflow, meaning that you always stay organized without having to worry about flags, color labels and ratings (though you can still use those, too).
Instead of having all your photos in one big catalog, you can focus on those at hand, and keep organized by using sessions.
How sessions compare to catalogs
Catalogs are what most of us know, and it’s what most other software programs rely on for their file organization. Think of a catalog like a database, referencing your files and letting you virtually organize them.
If you think back to your days in elementary school, most of us remember the Dewey Decimal System. That’s what I equate a catalog to being. It lets you find the photos without having to dig through your file manager, like Finder or Explorer, and then allows you to edit, export or otherwise organize the photos.
Sessions, on the other hand, are kind of like a file browser in itself. Your edits are saved to each image’s settings file, instead of in a catalog. The benefit here is it makes it easy to share a session among several different devices, always having your edits and other settings with you without having to rely on a catalog (database) file. It provides significantly more flexibility when working with your images.
There’s a great video I found by Gajan Balan that does a really great job at explaining the benefits of sessions:
How to choose between catalogs and sessions
Depending on what you like to photograph, this might be pretty easy to understand and ultimately make a decision on.
If you photograph a lot in-studio — for portraits or product — then sessions are a no-brainer. They can also be great for weddings, as you can have a separate session for each wedding without having to get confused between different wedding dates along the way.
Furthermore, if you work with a team of people, sessions make it much easier to share files and stay in-sync, as you can move your session files (with the photos) over to a thumb drive, pass it off to an assistant and then have them pass it back to you for delivery to the client.
But if you have a wide array of types of photos, a catalog might be easier to use and stay organized with. The downside here is as a catalog grows, it can ultimately become unorganized pretty quickly. So you have to stay on top of it if you truly want to take the most advantage of a catalog.
There’s room for a combined environment here, too. You could even take the thinking behind a session and make a separate catalog with that. For instance, my biggest client has its own catalog, which I chose because I have several different photoshoots for them per year, and regularly need to reference my older files.
Regardless of what you choose, Capture One offers some impressive tools to help you stay organized and get your work done.
