Avalanche for Capture One

Photo catalogs migration to Capture One

Fast, Accurate and Secure with Avalanche 

CONVERSION

Avalanche lets you move photo catalogs to Capture One

You can now easily turn your existing photo catalogs from Aperture, Lightroom, Luminar 4/AI, iVewMedia and Apple Photos into Capture One catalogs ready to be opened and edited.

Like all versions of Avalanche, Avalanche for Capture One allows you to transfer photo catalogs from one application to another while preserving your modifications and settings made in the original editing software. It also preserves the organization of your catalog, through the migration of albums, projects, annotations and tags.

Avalanche for Capture One features the same ease-of-use and migration quality that Avalanche is now renowned for, but it provides some specific features for Capture One users.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Preserve the retouching done on your original photos

Avalanche for Capture One uses Machine Learning and tries to automatically reproduce in Capture One the changes you’ve made to a photo in order to ensure it looks exactly the same after migration from your original catalog.Not all adjustments you make to your photos require AI. Some, like geometric adjustments (e.g. straightening, cropping), are done very precisely.Avalanche has been trained on a large collection of images that were manually adjusted for visual match in Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One and Luminar. From this extensive database covering many photographic styles, many cameras and formats, Avalanche has learned to convert to give you the best possible result.Avalanche for Capture One uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) for : White balance, exposure and light, color and tint, highlights and shadows.

Complex presets preserved

New: When migrating, Avalanche preserves new complex and advanced presets like HSL mixing, Color correction, Clarity conversion, and Dehaze conversion. Specifically, this means that Avalanche can now convert images using Lightroom Presets to Capture One with much higher accuracy.

Migration from Lightroom to the new Capture One 23 has been vastly improved by training AI to accurately convert advanced presets on Colors, Black & White, Clarity and Dehaze (operations that Capture One migration doesn’t manage perfectly without the help of Avalanche’s AI).

FAMILIAR ENVIRONMENT

Preserve your catalog architecture and much more

Preserve your organization structure

Keep your Metadata from your photos

C1 variants in Capture One

Support videos transfer to Capture One

Avalanche for Capture One has been designed from the beginning to preserve as much as possible of all the organization of your catalogs.

Metadata management is also at the heart of Avalanche. All Exif and IPTC metadata will correctly flow from your source catalog to Capture One. 

Flags and color labels are properly handled. 

Faces are not supported in Capture One, but Avalanche will preserve the faces labels as Keywords.

Avalanche for Capture One also smartly migrates the GPS information present in your source catalog.

Avalanche for Capture One will, as you’d expect, create C1 variants for all versions of a given master it encounters during the migration.

It will convert collections/albums, projects, collection sets and preserve the hierarchy of your original catalog.

It supports videos with all their metadata and will properly add the videos in their albums, projects,…  It supports versions for videos(with metadata) but does not support transferring edits made to videos. 

DISCOVER

Simple, efficient and powerful​ way to transfer your catalogs

IMPORT

Comparison between Capture One and Avalanche photo import

If you have tried to transfer your photos directly into Capture One, you may have experienced crashes, loss of your metadata or even loss of the edits to your photos. That is why CYME has created Avalanche for Capture One, the best tool to migrate your photos with the valuable adjustments you created in the original software.

The table below compares importing a photo library directly into Capture One or via Avalanche.

Import with
Capture One
Import with
Capture One
Transferred Features Import with
Avalanche for Capture One
Import with
Avalanche for Capture One
NoXWhite Balance of JPEG imagesYes
Uses AI
EstimatedXWhite Balance of RAW imagesYes
Uses AI
Basic conversionXBlack and White from ApertureAdvanced conversion with color mix
......Black and White from LR......
Import with
Capture One
Import with
Capture One
Transferred Features Import with
Avalanche
Import with
Avalanche for Capture One
NoXWhite Balance of JPEG imagesYes
Uses AI
EstimatedXWhite Balance of RAW imagesYes
Uses AI
Basic conversionXBlack and White from ApertureAdvanced conversion with color mix
NoXHighlights, Shadows, Blacks, WhitesYes
Uses AI
YesEdited GPS information in imagesYes
Yes
With hierarchy
Keywords Yes
With hierarchy
YesAperture Projects, Albums and FoldersYes
NoXVersions in AlbumsSince C1 v23
NoXSmart AlbumsXNo
Yes
(Flip, Rotation, Crop,…)
Geometrical effects Yes
(Flip, Rotation, Crop,…)
NoXCurvesYes
NoXColor Grading Yes
NoXHSL Color Yes
NoXClarity Yes
NoXDehaze Yes
NoXComplex adjustments Estimation of Vignetting, Levels, Sharpening,...
NoXPresets Conversion into C1 styles Optionally convert all LR presets into C1 styles
Does not allow to move managed files out of their parent libraryXManaged vs Referenced Files Full options to control what happens to referenced files.
NoXCopy master files to a new locationFull control
YesVideosYes
NoXOptionsYes
Many options
NoXConversion of Previews Yes
Many options
NoXConversion from Luminar 4, AIYes
NoXConversion from PhotosCurrently in beta
Migrates catalogs structure, image metadata and geometrical adjustments only
YesConversion from MediaProYes
(more version supported)
Note : Masks aren't yet supported by Avalanche

Going beyond the inbuilt import options

Capture One features an inbuilt function to import Lightroom or Aperture catalogs. Yet, Avalanche for Capture One goes beyond that feature in a number of key areas :

More accurate conversion of RAW settings

Avalanche for Capture One has been trained to understand how to best migrate your settings to Capture One. It goes way beyond what Capture One does when using the inbuilt importer.

More accurate conversion of JPEG settings

Capture One ignores the white balance settings applied on JPEG files, where Avalanche tries to accurately reflect the original setting in Capture One.

Include GPS information

The inbuilt migration loses the GPS information as Capture One requires GPS information to be included in EXIF file itself. Avalanche gives you the option to burn the GPS information in your masters during your migration.

More input catalogs

Avalanche for Lightroom supports importing from Luminar, Capture One, iView Media and now support importing from Apple Photos.

System requirements

Avalanche for Capture One require macOS 10.14 or later and run fine on Catalina.

Avalanche for Capture One is compatible with:

  • Aperture catalogs from version 3.6
  • Lightroom Classic catalogs from version 5
  • Luminar catalogs from version 4.2

 

You need around 145 MB of free space, 4GB of memory (8GB recommended) and enough space to accommodate the converted libraries.

A working copy of Apple Aperture or Capture One is not required to migrate libraries as Avalanche opens those libraries natively.

Limitations of Avalanche

(*) Not all edits can be converted due to the complexity of the proprietary formats of the catalogs. Avalanche for Capture One will not convert mask based edits, or local adjustments (spot removal, healing brushes, etc…). Advanced color grading is not handled either. All images that have adjustments that are not supported, will be placed in a dedicated album for easy review.

Technical support

If you’re on this page, chances are you’ve already compared the different software, be it Capture One vs Lightroom or Luminar AI vs Luminar 4 or Aperture.

In any case, we hope the above page has helped you answer the question: “How to best export your photos from Apple Photo, Google Photos, iView Media, Lightroom, Luminar or Luminar AI to Capture One”.

You can find more information about photo library migrations on our website and in our community area.

You will also find on our Youtube channel video tutorials about photo conversions using Avalanche. They will help you export your photo catalogs from Lightroom to Capture One.

Since the first version of avalanche, we keep on improving our migration software to offer you better products every day.

Avalanche Unlimited

Do you know the Avalanche Unlimited software? You should! 😉

Avalanche Unlimited includes all the features of Avalanche for Capture One, while also adding the functionality of exporting your photo libraries to Luminar and to Lightroom.

This means you no longer have the headache of comparing Capture One vs Luminar or Lightroom vs Capture One. Instead, you can take advantage of the best features of each editing software and export, transfer or migrate your photos from one editing solution to the other according to your needs, without fear of losing your changes.

Avalanche Unlimited manages, like Avalanche for Capture One, the import of your photos from Aperture, iView Media and Google Photos.

Frequently Asked Questions

Avalanche needs macOS 10.14 or newer, running on any kind of Mac bought around 2015 or later. Avalanche runs natively on Apple M1 macs and takes full advantage of the Apple chip for increased performances.

Yes. It never expires, and all features are available.
Only the first 100 images and videos will be converted.

Complex adjustment such as masks, non local adjustments, gradient based adjustments are not transferred. Avalanche for Capture One will detect images that have such adjustments and put them in a dedicated Collection in Capture One, so they are easy to identify and review.
The current list of supported adjustments can evolve in future versions of Avalanche. Get in touch using the email support@cyme.io if an effect that you use a lot is not supported. We will see what can be done.

Avalanche for Capture One preserves all your collections as well as folders and projects, if the source catalog supports such concepts. Hierarchies of collections are reproduced using CollectionSets. 

Yes. Avalanche for Capture One preserves all supported annotations in Lightroom (IPTC, flags, color labels, Keywords). Some annotations without equivalent (for example : the favourite flag) are converted using appropriate Capture One concepts.

Avalanche also preserves the GPS annotations when they have been edited (Aperture).

Not in the foreseeable future.

We are sorry for our friends on Windows but porting Avalanche to Windows is currently out of scope.

At CYME, we offer a very advantageous upgrade policy where you only pay the difference between the version you own and the unlimited version.

Simply contact us using our support desk and we will arrange it for you.

The size-on-disk of the catalog does not always matter. The speed of conversion is more dependent on the number of images in the catalog and on the conversion options. In particular, the number of files that need to be copied from one place to another.

As an example, if all your images are referenced in the source catalog and you are happy to leave them in their current location, the conversion time will not be affected by the copy of files. If on the other hand, you choose to relocate your masters, copy time will become an important contributor to the migration time.

As an example, we regularly get reports of very large migrations (100k, 250k or even 600k images) that went smoothly in a few hours.