Recently, I moved away from Capture One to Adobe Lightroom — partially for the better metadata management. I’ll admit it — lots of things are harder to do in Capture One than in Lightroom. But at the end of the day, Capture One just consistently gives me better looking images. On top of that, Lightroom always crashes for me. Recently when I got done with a shoot, I wondered how my edits would’ve looked in Capture One. Immediately, I was brought back to how much better of a photo editor Capture One is. And so it prompted me to try more things to find a solution to better metadata management.
The Problem
If you’re editing photos in Capture One, syncing the edits that you made to the images is pretty simple. But what is often missed are the really important things for managing your images. In this case, I’m talking about naming, captions, etc. As it is, Capture One doesn’t even call them “Captions.” Instead, they’re called “descriptions.” Now, in situations where you want to sync all the images together to have the same metadata — such as for a product shoot or a commercial portrait session — you can’t do that easily.
You think that all you’d need to do is edit a single image, select all that you want to have the same edits, and then click on “sync metadata.” But that’s apparently been a bug for a very long time.
So only by experimenting around did I finally find a fix.
The Fix
1. Make caption edits to the first image
2. Highlight all the images you want to have the same caption
3. In metadata, click the double arrow head,
4. Select the fields you want synced
5. Sync them by clicking apply.
After that, everything is synced up.
Capture One: Please Make Things Easier
Considering that Capture One does a lot of work with higher end studios, it’s odd to me that this would be lacking in many ways. But we’re sure that we’re not the only photographers looking to fix this problem. It would be incredible if Capture One let us customize the metadata of images in the export window or make the syncing much easier to do.
