On1 trial - part 1

Hi, I'm a LR 6 user looking to jump ship and I've just started a trial of Photoraw 2019. I've watched the Anthony Morganti video tutorials and it looks good so here I am. I'm hoping that On1 support might be reading this and would be interested to learn from the first impressions of a newbie. First impressions count and it might help them avoid putting off potential customers and gain sales. 

From the download site I was told, enter your email address and we'll send you an email with a download link. Well they did that but a 1GB download had already started and that was the installation file. It's no big deal but it isn't a good first impression if they can't get the installation instructions right. 

I did the installation and set about running the migration from LR. That ran for 50 minutes with the cpu at 100%. The number of files identified at this stage was about one third of my photos but maybe that's just the ones with LR adjustments, so no real concern there. Then "Migrating metadata started. This ran for much longer with cpu activity at only about 6% and disk activity in single % figures. I walked away and left it and it had completed when I returned. No messages were showing so I assume that no news is good news.

Then I started On1 for the first time. I expected to see a panel of all of my photos. Well, that was there but with two or three new photos per second being added and the sequence was weird, with very old photos alongside more recent ones. "All catalogued files" showed 70,000+ and rising fast. But I only have just over 10,000 photos so what's gpoing on? CPU was at 100% and response was sluggish to nil. Eventually some thumb nails appeared which I recognised as being .PNG map tiles from Openstreetmap (OSM)! It appears that On1 was going ALL over my pc looking for and cataloguing "photos". I have 26,000 PNG files on my C drive. 12,000 of these are map tiles and I very definitely do NOT want these adding to my photo catalog.

It seems to be a very bad idea to start cataloguing everything rather than wait to be told what to catalog. 

With some difficulty, due to the slow response, I managed to uncatalog the C drive and the headlong rush to catalog everything on it seems to have come to a halt. 

All of my photos are under one folder with many sub folders. I don't want to catalog all of the sub folders because some of them are "duplicated" JPEG exports spun off from LR so that when I stop using LR I still have an edited copy.

I am having some difficulty in hiding all of the drives, cloud locations and all of the other locations down the left hand side that I don't want to see.

I am currently cataloging those folders that I do want but the folder structure seems to be lost in doing this. For instance I have a Location folder and under that two sub folders; originals and edited. I don't want to catalog the edited folder. These two folder names are used again and again under different locations but they all get flattened. I'll have to ask support about this. 

Meanwhile cpu is running at 100%. I have no idea what On1 is doing. I have noticed that an .on1meta file has been created alongside every one of my photos where I've looked at the folder stucture. I can't imagine why these are created when I haven't edited the photo. Does anyone know?

That's about as far as I've got for now. I am still trying to tell On1 what should and should not be catalogued. The "All catalogued files" peaked at 85,000+ but is now down to something over 12,000. I am left wondering if the catalog is now a bloated size and do I have .on1meta files for all of the mysterious PNG and jpeg files that sit on every pc, even brand new?

Oh and one of my Collections is AWOL.

On the whole, not a good start. I'm hoping to get around to some editing at some point.

JH