Photoshop
Elements 6/7/8 (Windows) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
John R. Ellis
Last updated January 21, 2011
Copyright 2008-10 by John R. Ellis
As of June 2010 I no longer maintain this FAQ. I’ve
migrated to Lightroom 3, which I use for all my
organizing and most of my editing (I still use the Photoshop Elements Editor
for more involved editing). Adobe has
clearly decided not to invest sufficient resources for properly maintaining the
Photoshop Elements Organizer– see my Amazon review of PSE 8. Lightroom is marketed to
professionals and prosumers with tens of thousands of photos who demand
adequate organizational capabilities, whereas Photoshop Elements is marketed to
consumers, most of whom do not want or use the Organizer.
This page captures
my answers to frequent questions about Photoshop Elements 6, 7, and 8 (Windows). It’s mostly about the Organizer, since I know
the Organizer much better than the Editor.
The versions to
which each FAQ applies are indicated with the notation [PSE 6, 7, 8]. If I’m
not sure whether something applies to a version, it will be indicated with a
question mark, e.g. [PSE 7, 8?].
If you have corrections or suggestions, please email them to john at johnrellis.com.
Repair
or create a catalog if the Organizer won’t start
Delete
the Editor’s preferences if it’s crashing
Delete
the Organizer’s preferences if it’s crashing
PSE
7/8 Welcome Screen startup options and turning off the advertising
Processor
requirements for PSE 7
Recreate
Organizer thumbnails
Examine
the Organizer’s log file
The
Watch Folder Service is unavailable
PSE
and 64-bit Windows
Merging
catalogs
Setting
the Windows text size too large
Quickly
reconnecting large numbers of photos
Reconnecting
gives the message “old file was not reconnected to new file”
Workarounds
for exclude-photos-from-category bug
Try
Adobe’s generic troubleshooting
Troubleshooting
Organizer crashes
Troubleshooting
Editor crashes
Allow
Save For Web to remember the last settings
Licensing
has stopped working
The
list of printer profiles is incomplete
The
list of fonts is incomplete
Reset
the Organizer’s online-services state
Find
and delete duplicate images
Move
your photos to another computer
Move
your photos to another location
Storing
the catalog and photos on a network drive
Watching
Network Folders
The
Keyword Tags pane is sluggish
Problems
converting catalogs
Updating
for a long time on startup
Share
To Flickr, etc. is not available
Folder Location
view shows wrong contents of folders
Photos
appear in the recycle bin unexpectedly
Slide
show preview doesn’t show photos
Sharing
by Photo Mail or Attachments crashes PSE
Removing
all traces of PSE manually
Colors
are wrong in PSE but not other programs
Video
clips in a slide show are truncated
Backing
up your catalog
The
Help command (F1) does not work
Where
is the full User Guide
Using
a single catalog on multiple computers
Unknown
month, day, and time values
Installing
PSE on more than one computer
Some
photos are not displayed in the Organizer
All
the different dates and times
Date/times
of files are sometimes lost
Searches are
showing files that don’t match
Photos
not properly oriented when viewed in other programs
Keyword
tags, albums, smart albums, and stacks
Problems
opening raw files
Camera
name appears in captions
PSE
8 limitations on short displays
PSE
and Windows 7
Run
in Vista or XP compatibility mode on Windows 7
Problems
with the Auto-Analyzer
Zoom
and pan in Full Screen mode
Photomerge
Panorama fails with an error
Limits
on the size of a catalog
Duplicate
tags created by face recognition
Splitting
and rearranging catalogs
Images
in the Editor have the jaggies
Face
recognition stops recognizing people
View
hidden files in Windows Explorer
Get
Photos And Videos misbehaves on Windows 7
The
user interface is hard to read
Converting
to Lightroom 3
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Start PSE to get to the Welcome screen. Hold down the Ctrl, Alt, and Shift keys and click Organize. Keep holding down the keys until you see the Catalog window. Select your catalog and click Repair. Select “repair anyway” even if PSE doesn’t find problems. Then for good measure, click Optimize. (The documentation says that Optimize merely optimizes the performance of your catalog, but some people have reported that it also enabled catalog conversion to proceed after they initially encountered errors.)
If you’ve changed PSE 6 to start in the Organizer or Editor and thus can’t get to the Welcome screen, start the Editor, do Window > Welcome, and in the lower-left corner change it back to Start Up With Welcome Screen.
If repairing the catalog doesn’t help, repeat the steps above, but instead of clicking Repair, click New to create a new test catalog. If you’re able to import photos into the new catalog and the Organizer works correctly, then there’s likely something about the old catalog that is corrupted in some other way. In that case, try recreating the Organizer’s thumbnails.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the Editor crashes repeatedly or won’t start, often simply deleting its saved preferences fixes the problem. Start PSE to get to the Welcome screen. Hold down the Ctrl, Alt, and Shift keys and click Edit. Keep holding down the keys until you see a window asking “Delete the Adobe Photoshop Elements Settings File?” Click Yes. (Note that this does not delete the Organizer’s settings.)
If you’ve changed PSE 6 to start in the Organizer or Editor and thus can’t get to the Welcome screen, start the Editor, do Window > Welcome, and in the lower-left corner change it back to Start Up With Welcome Screen.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the Organizer is crashing on startup, sometimes deleting its saved preferences and registry entries fixes the problem. To do that, see these Adobe tech notes:
PSE 8, Vista/Windows 7, steps 3 and 12: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/513/cpsid_51386.html
PSE 8, XP, steps 3 and 11: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/513/cpsid_51385.html
PSE 7, Vista/Windows 7, step 3: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405398.html
PSE 7, XP, step 4: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404989.html
PSE 6, Vista/Windows 7, step 3: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402603.html
PSE 6, XP, step 4: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402520.html
[PSE 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The Welcome
Screen of PSE 7 and 8 is quite annoying to many users. It makes it
significantly slower to get into the Organizer or Editor, and in PSE 7, the
Welcome Screen shows Adobe marketing messages that annoy many people.
PSE 8 does
provide an option to automatically launch either the Editor or the Organizer
behind the Welcome Screen, but that is much slower than just launching the
Editor or Organizer directly from a shortcut (see below). On my current
computer, it takes 4 seconds to launch the Organizer directly, but 16 seconds
to launch it automatically via the Welcome Screen.
In addition,
many people are annoyed by the constant flashing “tips” in the lower right
corner of the PSE 7/8 Organizer and Editor.
Here are
some workarounds:
[PSE 7, 8] Create
shortcuts directly to the Organizer and Editor. For the
Editor, use Windows Explorer to navigate to:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0 (PSE 7, XP,
Vista/Windows 7 32-bit)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0 (PSE 7, Vista/Windows
7 64-bit)
C:\Program
Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 8.0 (PSE 8, XP, Vista/Windows 7 32-bit)
C:\Program
Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 8.0 (PSE 8, Vista/Windows 7 64-bit)
Find the file PhotoshopelementsEditor.exe,
right-click it, and select either Send To Desktop to create a shortcut on your
desktop or Pin To Start Menu to put it on your Windows
Start menu. For the Organizer, navigate
to:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0 (PSE 7, XP,
Vista/Windows 7 32-bit)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0 (PSE 7, Vista/Windows
7 64-bit)
C:\Program
Files\Adobe\ Elements 8.0 Organizer (PSE 8, XP, Vista/Windows 7 32-bit)
C:\Program
Files (x86)\Adobe\ Elements 8.0 Organizer (PSE 8, Vista/Windows 7 64-bit)
Find the file PhotoshopelementsOrganizer.exe, right-click it, and select either Send To Desktop to create a shortcut on your desktop or Pin To Start Menu to put it on your Windows Start menu.
[PSE
7] Edit the registry to restore the PSE 6 behavior. You can change
which application PSE 7 starts initially by editing this value in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\7.0\common\settings\STARTUP_APP
There are three possible values:
0 – Start in the
Organizer
1 – Start in the Editor
2 – Start in the Welcome Screen
If you don’t know how to edit the registry, I recommend
creating shortcuts as described above.
(Thanks to Livio Bertacco
for this tip.)
[PSE 7, 8?]
Turn off the advertising on the Welcome Screen.
By turning off the advertising, you can still use the Welcome Screen to get to
the Organizer, the Editor, Photoshop.com, and the tutorials. Use Windows
Explorer to set the permissions of
C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\7.0\Locale\en_US\Welcome Screen Pods (Vista,
Windows 7)
C:\Documents
and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\7.0\Locale\en_US\Welcome
Screen Pods (XP)
to
deny “Read & execute” for Everyone. (You may need to change the settings of
Windows Explorer to view
hidden files.)
Warning: At least one person has reported finding numerous
files starting with “IPOD_” scattered throughout her pictures folders, and it
may be that this solution sometimes causes this to happen – we’re not
sure. So beware.
[PSE 7, 8?]
Turn off the flashing “tips” on the lower right corner of the Organizer and
Editor. Use Windows Explorer to set the permissions of
C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\7.0\Locale\en_US\Messaging Pods (Vista,
Windows 7)
C:\Documents
and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\7.0\Locale\en_US\Messaging Pods (XP)
to
deny “Read & execute” for Everyone. (You may to change the settings of
Windows Explorer to view
hidden files.)
The warning above about “IPOD_” files applies here as well.
[PSE 7]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Adobe’s System Requirements for PSE 7 specify a processor “2 GHz or faster”. That’s sloppy marketing by Adobe – PSE 7 will run fine on many consumer computers with slower processors. If you have any doubt, download the free trial and give it a whirl.
Most consumer laptops sold in the last few years have processors slower than 2 GHz – as of November 2008, Dell is still selling midrange Inspiron and Studio notebooks with dual-core 1.86 GHz processors. Adobe surely didn’t intend to exclude such a large part of the consumer market.
There are a number of factors other than processor speed that can have a bigger impact on performance: the number of cores (dual- or single-core), total amount of memory available, the size of the cache, the speed of the memory bus, the speed of the disk. For example, a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor with 3 GB of memory, a 2 MB cache, and a 667 MHz bus could run most applications much faster than a 2 GHz single-core processor with 1 GB of memory, a 1 MB cache, and a 533 MHz bus.
The amount of memory is the single most important factor affecting PSE’s performance. For Vista and Windows 7, Adobe “requires” at least 1 GB, but you’ll be happier with at least 2 GB. Memory is less than $25 per gigabyte, and that’s the best $25 you’ll spend on your computer.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 laptop purchased July 2008 with a dual-core 1.8 GHz processor and 3 GB of memory, and PSE 7 runs just fine on Vista and Windows 7. It has a Windows Experience Index base score of 3.5 (to see your score in Vista and Windows 7, click the Start menu, right-click Computer and select Properties). The Organizer is pretty zippy, and the Editor has no problem editing JPEGs and raws from a 10 MP camera. I occasionally make panoramas with 4 or 5 photos and, while it has to think a while, it does OK.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The Organizer keeps a cache of thumbnails for all imported photos, and sometimes that cache gets corrupted – thumbnails appear blank, look like a torn page, or contain an hourglass, and sometimes the Organizer crashes. Here are some things to try:
1. First, look in the lower-left corner of the screen. If it says “Generating thumbnails”, wait until it finishes. PSE can generate about 5,000 to 10,000 thumbnails per hour.
2. If you have lots of raw photos in PSE 6 on a newer computer, you may have encountered a PSE 6 bug. See this tech note for a workaround:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403728.html
This bug appears to have been fixed in PSE 7.
3. Try repairing the catalog by doing File > Catalog > Repair followed by File > Catalog > Optimize.
4. Try regenerating the thumbnails. Do Show All, Edit > Select All, and then Edit > Update Thumbnail.
5. If Update Thumbnail doesn’t work, try deleting the thumbnail cache. Configure Windows Explorer to view hidden files. Then do Help > System Info to find the folder containing your catalog. Exit PSE. In Windows Explorer, navigate to that folder and delete the file “thumb.5.cache”. Restart PSE.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
The Organizer writes various status messages to a log file, which can be very helpful for troubleshooting. The file is located at:
PSE 6/7, XP: C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\v.0\Organizer\Log.txt
PSE 6/7, Vista, Windows 7: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\v.0\Organizer\Log.txt
PSE 8, XP: C:\Documents
and Settings\user\Application
Data\Adobe\Elements Organizer\v.0\Organizer\Log.txt
PSE 8, Vista, Windows 7: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Elements
Organizer\v.0\Organizer\Log.txt
(Substitute 6, 7, or 8 for v.)
You may need to configure Windows Explorer to view hidden files.
The file is more readable if you open it in Wordpad or Word than in Notepad. To open in Wordpad, right-click the file in Windows Explorer and select Open With > Wordpad.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you invoke File > Watch Folders and get the error message “The Watch Folder Service is unavailable”, try restarting the file-monitor service. Go to the Windows Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services, select “Adobe Active File Monitor vi” (substitute 6, 7, or 8 for i). Right-click Properties, make sure Start Type is set to Automatic. Then click Start.
The Active File Monitor service is supposed to be always running, but for some unknown reason, it sometimes gets configured to not run.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Windows 7 32-bit and Vista 32 are
limited to using no more than 3 GB (and a bit) of memory, whereas Windows 7
64-bit and Vista 64, used on new computers, let you have much more. That extra
memory can be a real boon to memory-intensive graphics programs.
However, there are a number of
considerations when deciding whether to run PSE on 64-bit Windows:
-
There’s no advantage
to using PSE on 64-bit Windows unless you have significantly more than 3 GB of
memory (e.g. 6 GB).
- Many people have reported on the Adobe forums and Elements Village that PSE 5.0.2, 6, 7, and 8 run fine on 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista. The only known limitation is that the downloader will not start automatically, nor will it be listed in the Windows Autoplay options on PSE 7 and higher – you have to manually do File > Get Photos And Videos > From Camera or Card Reader:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402507.html
- Adobe officially does not support PSE 6 and earlier on Vista 64. They have published no official policy for PSE 7 or 8, though Customer Support has declined to help people with Vista 64.
The official policy for PSE 6 and earlier is here:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403403.html
For PSE 8, the published System Requirements say simply that Windows 7 is supported, with no mention of 64-bit. Microsoft distributes 32- and 64-bit Windows 7 on the same DVD, but who knows what Adobe Customer Support might do.
Adobe has a distribution agreement with Dell to sell PSE 7 preloaded on Dell XPS desktops that have Vista 64 only, implying that Adobe supports PSE 7 on Vista 64, at least on Dells.
As of 3/7/2009, Adobe doesn’t explicitly state whether it provides customer support for PSE 7 on Vista 64. The System Requirements now state “Certified for 32-bit version of Windows”, which vaguely implies they don’t support Vista 64 (but why don’t they just say that?). There are some tech notes that mention Vista 64 without saying that it is unsupported, and the Read Me explicitly mentions one minor issue with Vista 64 without saying that it is unsupported. So someone buying PSE could reasonably assume that Adobe supports PSE 7 on Vista. However, at least one person has reported that Adobe Technical Support told them that PSE 7 is unsupported on Vista 64.
-
You’ll need a new set
of drivers for your peripherals, and some vendors still don’t provide 64-bit
drivers. For example, Nikon doesn’t provide Vista 64 drivers for its Coolscan scanners.
-
Vista/Windows 7 64-bit
does a very good job of running programs developed for 32-bit Windows XP and
Vista, but it isn’t perfect. You should research the compatibility of your
favorite programs.
-
A program developed
for 32-bit Windows will be limited on Vista/Windows 7 64 to using no more than
2 GB of memory (infrequently, it can use 3 GB), the same as on Vista/Windows 7
32. There is still some advantage to having 64-bit Windows if you want to run
other memory-intensive programs concurrently, since together they may be using
more than 3 GB.
-
Of Adobe programs, PSE
is 32-bit only, while Photoshop and Lightroom have 64-bit versions. I don’t
know about Premier Pro or Elements.
-
If you’re editing
“normal” sized photos, an Adobe Lightroom blog says to expect only modest 10%
speed improvements from Vista 64. I’d guess that you should expect similar
modest improvements with PSE, but I haven’t read anything authoritative.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
PSE doesn’t directly allow two catalogs or parts of catalogs to be merged. But for common file types such as JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and most raw files, migrating the files between catalogs is doable, though clunky with warts. If you want to migrate only a subset of the files, it’s easier if you’re willing to copy the files than share them between the catalogs.
At the high level, the steps are straightforward:
1. Import the part of the tag and album hierarchy you’d like from the source catalog.
2. Identify the files in the source catalog you’d like to import and write their metadata into the files.
3. Export the selected files into a new folder.
4. Import the files into the destination catalog.
5. Stack the imported files if they were in stacks or version sets in the source catalog.
6. Recreate your albums.
If you want to migrate file types that don’t support metadata (e.g. BMP) or whose metadata PSE can’t manipulate (e.g. Quicktime videos), this approach doesn’t work. Neither will it work if you want to share a subset of files between the two catalogs without copying the files.
This approach also won’t migrate your projects (e.g. slide shows).
In more detail:
1. Import the part of the tag and album hierarchy you’d like from the
old catalog.
To do this, in the source catalog use the Save Keyword Tags To File command, from the drop-down menu next to the “+” in the Keyword Tags pane. This will write the tag structure into a text file. The Save command gives you the option of exporting all tags are just one particular subtree in the hierarchy (e.g. People); you can also edit the text file before importing it to delete tags you don’t want to transfer.
Then, in the destination catalog use the Keyword Tags > + > From File command to import the text file. You have the option of merging the imported tags with the existing ones or creating new additional tags.
Note that you don’t need to repeat this step on successive imports if the tag hierarchy hasn’t changed. You don’t even need to do this step if you just want to import the tag names themselves and not their parent categories – PSE will bring in the tag names in step 4 when you import the files.
Use similar steps to copy the album hierarchy, using the Albums > + > Save Albums To File and From File.
2. Identify the files in the source catalog you’d like to import and write their metadata into the files.
Using the Organizer’s search features and tags, identify the photos you’d like to import from the source catalog. For example, you could assign a temporary tag to them.
If there are albums in the source catalog you’d like to move, for each album create a new temporary tag and assign it to the photos in the album.
Then use the File > Write Keyword Tags And Properties command to write the Organizer’s catalog metadata to the selected files, including the date and time, caption, notes, and keywords. Beware that PSE 6 (and perhaps earlier versions) doesn’t tell you if it can’t write the data to the files, either because PSE doesn’t know how to manipulate the file format, the file is readonly, or because of bugs in PSE. (PSE 7 does give such warning for unknown formats and readonly files.)
Note that the Write Keyword Tags command has a fair number of bugs and often doesn’t write the metadata correctly; for a partial list, see:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/#_Writing_File_Metadata
Use the free utility psedbtool to ensure that files in the source catalog have correct metadata.
3. Export the selected files into a new folder.
Use the File > Export command to export (copy) the selected files into a new destination folder.
Note that if you’re merging an entire catalog, you don’t need to export the files. Nor would you need to export if you could easily identify the files to be imported from the source catalog by, say, folder location.
4. Import the files into the destination catalog.
Use the File > Get Photos command to import the files from the new folder into the destination catalog. PSE will ask you if you want to import the keyword tags recorded in the files’ metadata (you do).
5. Stack the imported files if they were in stacks or version sets in
the source catalog.
If sets of the imported files were originally in version sets or stacks, you can quickly restack them in the destination catalog using the Edit > Stack > Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks. This will suggest stackings of the imported files based on visual similarity and date/time, and you can easily modify the suggestions before committing. I’ve found it works pretty well for version sets created by routine photo editing.
Unfortunately, if you exported stacks with photos that aren’t visually similar, the Automatically Suggest command isn’t going to work well and you’ll have to manually restack.
Using stacks in the destination catalog for what were originally version sets in the source catalog isn’t perfect – you don’t get PSE’s special handling of version sets if you continue editing in the destination catalog.
6. Recreate your albums.
For each of the albums you’re moving, in the Keyword Tags pane click on the temporary tag you created for the album in step 2. This will show all the photos in the album. Select all of them and assign them to the corresponding album. Unfortunately, the order of the photos within the album won’t be preserved – you’ll have to reorder them manually.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you set your Windows display to have a text size larger than 100%, PSE will exhibit some glitches in its user interface. (On XP and Vista, the text size is called “DPI” – dots per inch – and 96 DPI is equivalent to 100% in Windows 7.) Many newer, high-resolution displays and laptop screens are set to a larger text size to make text in applications more readable.
The glitches and workarounds include:
- The Organizer’s menu bar (File, Edit, etc.) won’t show up. You can either set the Windows text size back to 100% (96 DPI), or you can set the Organizer option Edit > Preferences > General > Use System Font. With the latter, the results aren’t always the prettiest, e.g. the font in the Editor’s menu bar stays small, but the font in the dropdown menus gets large. But this workaround at least lets you keep the text size large so that you can read the text in all your other applications.
- The Advanced Dialog in the Photo Downloader won’t be available in PSE 8. (That also occurs on short displays.) You’ll need to reduce the Windows text size to something less – how much depends on the resolution of your display.
- The Editor on Windows 7 can show a mouse cursor for some tools that looks like three distorted shadows of the true cursor. You’ll need to reduce the Windows text size to less than 150% (149% works fine).
To change the Windows text size/DPI of your display:
XP: Start > Control Panel > Display or Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display. Click Settings > Advanced.
Vista: Windows Start > Control Panel > Personalization > Adjust Font Size (DPI).
Windows 7: Start > Control Panel > Display. To choose a custom size, click Set Custom Text Size (DPI) on the left.
Microsoft user-interface standards require applications to support text sizes larger than100%. This is especially important with the newer, high-resolution displays and for people with aging eyes. Adobe has chosen not to follow the standard.
[PSE
6, 7, 8?]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
When you move photos from one location to another using Windows Explorer or some other tool outside of the Organizer, PSE reports those files as “missing”, and a yellow question mark appears on the thumbnails in the Organizer. The File > Reconnect command can reconnect those files with their new location, but it can be very slow and sometimes only connects a few files at a time.
It’s always best to move files and folders using the Organizer, avoiding the need to reconnect. But if you’ve already moved those files, here are some ways of coping:
1. Move the files back to their original location using Windows Explorer. Then use PSE to move the files to their desired location.
2. Reconnect an entire folder all at once. If you can’t or don’t want to use the first method, you can use File > Reconnect > All Missing to reconnect more than one file at a time.
It’s not immediately obvious, but the Reconnect > All Missing window can reconnect an entire folder of files all at once. On the left-hand side, under Files Missing from Catalog, click Select All. On the right side, under Locate the Missing Files, browse to the folder containing the files. A thumbnail of one of the files should be displayed. Click Reconnect, and all the files in the folder will be reconnected. If there are files in other folders remaining to be connected, they’ll still be displayed on the left, and you can repeat the process.
3. Reconnect an entire folder tree all at once. If you’ve moved an entire tree of folders and they’re now disconnected, you can persuade PSE to reconnect them all quickly.
a. In Edit > Preferences > Files, select the option Automatically Search For And Reconnect Missing Files.
b. Do File > Reconnect > Missing File to reconnect one file manually.
c. Do File > Reconnect > All Missing. PSE will start searching “near” the folder containing the missing file you reconnected in step b, and it will usually find all the missing files within a couple of minutes of searching.
d. If step c doesn’t find all the missing files, or you’re impatient, you can explicitly tell PSE where to search:
i.
Do Help > System Info and write down the
folder location of your catalog.
ii. Exit PSE.
iii. Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the catalog folder.
iv. Open the file “rmf.3.cache” in Notepad. This file was created in step b above. It contains the most recent folders in which you reconnected files (“rmf” = “reconnected media folders”), and the Reconnect command always searches these folders first before scanning the rest of your drives.
v. Delete all of the contents of the file and add a single line containing the full path of root of the folder tree containing your photos. For example, if you moved the folder tree to E:\data\photos, add that as a single line to the file.
vi. Save the file.
vii. Restart PSE and do File > Reconnect All Missing again. It should first search the folder tree you provided in step v.
4. Reconnect photos residing on an offline drive. PSE considers a file in your catalog as “offline” if it resides on a CD, DVD, removable drive (such as a flash drive), or network drive that isn’t currently connected to your computer. An offline file is one that might show up later on, such as when you reconnect your laptop to the network containing your file server or you insert a DVD containing your archived photos. The Organizer marks the thumbnail of an offline file with an icon in the corner, a red circle with a vertical line through it.
Note that if you use Windows Explorer to move files from a network drive, PSE will consider those files as offline, not missing.
The PSE Reconnect All Missing command won’t reconnect offline files – it just tells you there are no files to reconnect. But you can force PSE to reconnect many offline files at once:
a. Select all the photos that are offline.
b. Do File > Write Keyword Tag and Properties Info.
c. In the Find Offline Volumes window that pops up, select Reconnect and click OK.
d. Reconnect an entire folder of photos using method 2. Repeat for each separate folder on the offline drive.
Unfortunately, method 3 doesn’t appear to work with offline files on a network drive. If you have a large number of individual folders and don’t have the patience to reconnect each folder in turn, you can either use method 1 (restore the files to their original location) or, for network drives, recreate the original UNC name (e.g. \\mycomputer\share). (You could also try editing the catalog file using the tool “sqlite3” – search the Adobe forums for how to do it. But that’s sketchy at best.)
[PSE 6, 7]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you try to reconnect a file and get the message “old file was not connected to new file” or “The file already exists in the catalog”, then you’ve stumbled over a PSE bug for which there are workarounds. See here:
http://johnrellis.com/psedbtool/#_Detecting_Problems_with
This bug appears to have been fixed in PSE 8.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The
Organizer in PSE 6 and later broke the ability to exclude from a search all
photos tagged with a category or a tag within that category.
Suppose
you want to show all photos not tagged with the Places category or a tag within
the Places category. In previous versions, you’d right-click Places in the
Keywords Pane and select “Exclude photos with Places category from search
results”. But that’s broken since PSE 6.
There are two partial workarounds.
1. In PSE 7 and
later, you can use the search text box to enter the query “not tag:Places”. Unfortunately, this will also incorrectly
exclude photos that happen to have other tags containing the string “places” anywhere
in their name.
2. In PSE 6 and
later you can do this:
a)
In the Find bar, Show All. (This shows all photos.)
b)
In the Keyword Tags pane, check the box to the left of
Places. (This shows only those photos tagged with Places or a tag within the
Places category.)
c)
In the Find bar, select Options > Hide Best Match Results
and then select Options > Show Results that Do Not Match. (Only photos not
tagged with Places or a tag within the Places category will be shown.)
Unfortunately,
you can’t combine this workaround with additional search criteria, i.e. all
photos without a Places tag and in the date range 1986 – 2000. Thanks much to JonE at Elements Village who suggested this solution.
[PSE
6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
Here are links to the don’t-have-a-clue troubleshooting steps Adobe recommends for installation problems:
PSE 8, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/515/cpsid_51562.html
PSE 8, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/515/cpsid_51561.html
PSE 7, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406651.html
PSE 7, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404992.html
PSE 6, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402598.html
PSE 6, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402597.html
And here are the troubleshooting steps Adobe recommends for system errors and freezes:
PSE 8, Editor, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/533/cpsid_53371.html
PSE 8, Organizer & Editor, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/513/cpsid_51384.html
PSE 8, Organizer, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/513/cpsid_51386.html
PSE 8, Organizer, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/513/cpsid_51385.html
PSE 7, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405398.html
PSE 7, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404989.html
PSE 6, Windows 7/Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402603.html
PSE 6, XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402520.html
For PSE 6 and 7, use the Vista tech note for troubleshooting with Windows 7.
In all of these, in the step that has you uninstall and reinstall in simplified mode with no other applications run in the background, do this as well:
1. After uninstalling, remove any remaining traces of PSE manually, as described here.
2. When using “msconfig” to disable background services for running in simplified mode, be sure to disable any Microsoft Intellipoint services (Intellipoint is software for Microsoft pointing devices that isn’t essential, and it often conflicts with PSE).
3. Then after installing in simplified mode, try running PSE in simplified mode after reinstalling. There might be a conflict with a third-party device driver or service.
If you call Adobe’s technical support and they can’t quickly identify your problem, they will most likely take you through these same steps. Note that they have a reputation for sometimes being way too quick to suggest reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Unfortunately, there are many reasons why the PSE Organizer might crash, and often it is hard to diagnose quickly the reason for the crash. Here are some steps you can take to try to fix the problem. Even if you think you’ve tried some of these before, try them again, precisely as described here:
1. In PSE 8, Turn off the Auto-Analyzer and automatic people recognition via Edit > Preferences > Auto-Analyzer Options > Analyze All Media In Catalog Automatically and Recognize People Automatically. They can cause PSE to crash (and there are other reasons to turn off the Auto-Analyzer).
2. In PSE 8, don’t use the text box in the Keyword Tags pane to apply tags to media files. It crashes PSE after just a couple dozen uses.
3. Delete the Organizer’s preferences. PSE is notorious for soiling its own preference files.
4. Repair your catalog, and if that doesn’t help, try creating a new test catalog, as described in those same steps.
5. Recreate the Organizer’s thumbnails.
7. Reset the Organizer’s online-services state.
8. Run in Vista or XP compatibility mode if you’re on Windows 7.
9. Try Adobe’s generic troubleshooting steps.
10. Contact Adobe’s customer support.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Unfortunately, there are many reasons why the PSE Editor might crash, and often it is hard to diagnose quickly the reason for the crash. Here are some steps you can take to try to fix the problem. Even if you think you’ve tried some of these before, try them again, precisely as described here:
1. Delete the Editor’s preferences. PSE is notorious for soiling its own preference files.
3. Change the default printer, as described in these tech notes:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402704.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/400/kb400963.html
4. If you have a Microsoft pointing device, the Microsoft Intellipoint driver software may be conflicting with the Editor. Try uninstalling it and rebooting. (Your device may operate without the software.)
5. If the Editor crashes after displaying “Building TWAIN menu items” on the splash screen, see this tech note:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408846.html
6. Run in Vista or XP compatibility mode if you’re on Windows 7.
7. Try Adobe’s generic troubleshooting steps. If you’ve installed third-party plug-ins, start with that step first.
8. Contact Adobe’s customer support.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The Editor’s Save For Web command is supposed to remember the most recently used settings (e.g. JPEG, Low quality). But it forgets them after you exit the Editor. To fix this:
1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe.
2. Right click the Photoshop Elements 7.0 folder and select Properties.
3. Click the Security tab and then Edit.
4. Click Add and enter “Everyone” in the Object Names box. Click OK.
5. Under Group Or User Names, select Everyone, check the box under Allow / Full Control, and click OK.
Alternatively, you can run the Editor as administrator; but on Vista/Windows 7, this will prevent you from dragging files from Explorer into the Editor to open them.
I haven’t tested this on XP or with earlier versions of PSE, but it should probably work. Thanks to Frederic Friedel on the Adobe forums who discovered the basic problem.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you try to start PSE and nothing happens, other than perhaps an hourglass cursor, or if you get an error message that PSE has crashed or stopped working or that “Licensing for this product has stopped working”, then see this tech note:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405970.html
Even though the latter tech note says it applies to Creative Suite, it also applies to Photoshop Elements 6. There are out-of-date Adobe tech notes (e.g kb403002) that refer to old versions of the update and that say it is for Vista only. Ignore those.
[PSE 6, 7, 8?]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
In the Editor’s Print window, sometimes the list of printer profiles looks incomplete, with many profiles that are installed in Windows not appearing. There are two possible causes of this:
- Sometimes PSE positions the Print window such that the scroll bar for the profile list is obscured. Try moving the window all the way to the left so that just the Printer Profile part of the window is showing, with the rest off-screen on the left. Then click the drop-down menu for profiles.
- If the previous step doesn’t help, click on the drop-down menu to expose the list, and then use the up- and down-cursor keys to navigate through the list. PSE 7 isn’t displaying the scroll bar for the drop-down menu, and there is a similar bug with the list of fonts.
[PSE 7, 8?]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
In the Editor’s Type Tool, the list of fonts sometimes looks incomplete, with many fonts installed in Windows not appearing. This is a bug – PSE 7 isn’t displaying the scroll bar for the drop-down menu.
To work around this, click on the drop-down menu to expose the list of fonts, then use the up- and down-cursor keys to navigate through the list.
There is a similar bug with printer profiles.
[PSE
6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
If a photo upload to an online service like Smugmug or Flickr fails, the Organize may then crash every time you try to restart it. Reinstalling has no effect.
To troubleshoot this, start the Organizer and let it crash. Then check the contents of the file:
PSE 6/7, XP: C:\Documents
and Settings\user\Application
Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\v.0\Organizer\log.txt
PSE 6/7, Windows 7/Vista: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Photoshop
Elements\v.0\Organizer
PSE 8, XP: C:\Documents
and Settings\user\Application
Data\Adobe\Elements Organizer\v.0\Organizer\log.txt
PSE 8, Windows 7/Vista: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Elements
Organizer\v.0\Organizer
Replace v with 6, 7, or 8. You may need to configure Windows Explorer to view hidden files.
If the last line is:
Initializing OLS
then you’ve been struck by this bug. To work around it, see this Adobe tech note:
PSE 6: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405252.html
PSE 7: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408913.html
The PSE 7 tech note also applies to PSE 8 – replace 7.0 with 8.0 in the folder name it says to delete.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Sometimes you end up with lots of duplicate images in your catalog, perhaps because you copied folders in Windows Explorer. While there are many utilities that can help you find duplicate files, their use with PSE is problematic: If you use the utility to delete the duplicates, they'll be marked as missing in your catalog. You can use File > Reconnect to remove those missing photos, though many people struggle with that command. But many times, people need to look in the catalog to see which duplicate they want to delete -- one copy will be tagged, stacked, in a slide show, or in an album, and the other duplicate isn't. The third-party utility doesn't make that easy, and the wrong copy could get deleted.
Here’s one method for quickly finding and deleting them within PSE, using the little-known Organizer command Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks to group duplicates into stacks:
1. Create a new tag called PossibleDup.
2. Do Show All and then Find > All Stacks. To the right of the Show All button, select Options > Hide Best Match Results and Options > Show Results That Do Not Match. This shows all photos that are not currently in stacks.
3. Do Edit > Select All and assign the tag PossibleDup to those images.
4. Do Show All and then check the box next to the PossibleDup; again only images not in stacks are showing.
5. Do Edit > Select All and Edit > Stack > Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks. This will identify images that are possible duplicates based on the time they were taken and their visual similarity.
6. Review the suggested stacks, removing photos that you don’t want considered as duplicates from the suggested stacks. Also, in each stack, if there is a preferred duplicate you want to keep, place that image first in the stack. See the manual for more details on how to rearrange the suggested stacking. Click Stack All Groups when you’re satisfied with the stacking of duplicates. Now each stack tagged with PossibleDup is a stack containing duplicates.
7. Do Find > By Details and select All Of The Following Search Criteria. For the first criterion, choose Keyword Tags - Include - PossibleDup. Click “+” to add a criterion, and choose Stack - Is - In A Stack. Click Search. Now only stacks containing duplicates are showing.
8. You can continue to review the stacks of duplicates and refine them in the Organizer. Make sure that the stacks showing contain only the duplicates you want to delete, and that the top of each stack is the version you want to keep.
9. Do Edit > Select All and Edit > Stack > Flatten Stack. This will delete all but the tops of the stacks.
10. Delete the tag PossibleDup.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
To move your catalog and photos to another computer, the easiest method is to use PSE’s backup and restore commands. See this Adobe tech note for details:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402894.html
(It applies to PSE 7/8 as well as 6.) Note that if you’re moving between versions of Windows and your images are stored under My Pictures or Pictures, I recommend using the Restore option New Location / Restore Original Folder structure. If you use the option Original Location, PSE could get confused (due to the complicated way that Windows handles My Pictures / Pictures).
While it is possible to simply copy the catalog and folder hierarchy containing your photos to the new computer, there are some gotchas involved. Even if you put your photos in the exact same locations on the new computer, PSE often won’t find them, and you’ll end up needing to reconnect your entire catalog. Though it is possible to coax PSE to do that reconnect reasonably quickly, it is quite fussy and requires multiple steps and careful attention to detail.
If you chose to move the catalog manually rather than using backup/restore, be sure to copy the entire catalog folder, not just the catalog.pse*db database file. The catalog folder contains information about your projects (e.g. slide shows), previews of archived files, and the state of the synchronization with Photoshop.com.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Never move your photos from location to another outside of PSE – PSE will lose track of where they are, and you’ll have to reconnect them, a sometimes dicey and laborious process. Better to use PSE to move your photos.
To move individual photos from one folder to another, you can use the File > Move command. But beware that the PSE 6 Move command also has a serious bug – if you move a file to a folder that already has a file of the same name, the destination file gets permanently deleted. (That’s fixed in PSE 7.)
To move an entire folder hierarchy of photos to another location, for example, to an external drive, use Display > Folder Location view. In the left-hand folder pane of Folder Location view, you can drag and drop folders, just like in Windows Explorer (this isn’t documented in the Help). Note that you must drop the folder on another drive or folder shown in the folder pane – you can’t drop it into a Windows Explorer window.
One tip: Folder Location view doesn’t show a subfolder unless it contains at least one photo in the catalog. So to expose a subfolder, place a dummy photo in it and import it. Another tip: You may want to move one subfolder at a time until you’re sure it’s working the way you want; some people have reported problems trying to move very large hierarchies all at once.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
While it is possible to store your catalog and photos on a network drive, I’d recommend against doing so unless you have a wired network and you are experienced in managing networked Windows computers.
Like most database applications, PSE is very sensitive to the speed of the network. On a wireless network, even with new “n” gear, you’re likely to have unacceptably slow performance. The network latency (the time it takes a packet to get from one computer to another) of wireless networks is often simply too high.
But even with wired networks, unless the computer or server storing your files is fast enough, you could be disappointed in PSE’s performance. Many inexpensive consumer file servers and Windows itself simply aren’t very fast at serving files over the network.
If you store your photos on the server but keep your catalog on a local disk, you’re likely to get more acceptable performance. This is because the catalog folder contains both the database file (catalog.pse*db) and the thumbnail cache (thumb.5.cache), which are by far the most frequently accessed files.
If you do store your catalog on a network drive, there’s an important consideration. The photos in the catalog must be accessed using the same UNC path (e.g. \\mycomputer\photos) from each computer running PSE. This happens automatically if you’re using a separate NAS (network attached storage) device or server.
But if you’re storing the photos on one of the computers that is also running PSE, you need to do something special. Suppose you have two computers, A and B, and you want to run PSE on both of them and store the catalogs and photos on A in the folder C:\Photos. Create a shared network folder \\A\Photos, and then map it as a network drive on both B and A (yes, A can map its own folder). Though it’s not necessary, use the same drive letter, say Z:, on both machines to avoid confusion. Then when using PSE on either machine, be sure to import photos only from Z:, not from C: or any other drive letter. That way, the catalog will only contain references to \\A\Photos, which can be understood by both A and B.
Also, be sure that the catalog is open in only one instance of PSE at a time.
Finally, if you want to watch a network folder, read this.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
It is possible to watch network folders with File > Watch Folders, but there a couple of considerations.
First, you need to use UNC syntax (\\mycomputer\photos) rather than a drive letter to specify the folders to be watched, because the Windows service implementing watched folders doesn’t have access to your drive-letter definitions.
You may get the error message:
The Watch Folder Service returned an error: The system cannot find the path specified.
This occurs because watched folders are implemented by a Windows service that normally runs in the Local System account and doesn’t have access to your logon credentials, which could be needed to access the network drive.
To change the logon of the service, go to the Control Panel and open Services. Select Adobe Active File Monitor Vv (substitute 6, 7, or 8 for v) and click the Properties button. On the Logon tab, change to “This account” and enter the name of your account (on the computer that runs PSE) and its password.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Sometimes the Keyword Tags pane is painfully slow to use – expanding and collapsing categories, scrolling, dragging a keyword to a photo. My tests showed that PSE 6 became unusable with more than 500 or so unique keyword tags, but that PSE 7 was able to handle at least 1500 to 2000 keyword tags.
In PSE 8, moving a tag to another category can be painfully slow on medium- and large-sized catalogs. For example, on my main catalog with 16,000 images and 570 keyword tags, it takes 55 seconds to move a tag to another category. The problem gets worse the larger the catalog. You can work around this by doing a search that shows less than a hundred or so photos (e.g. do Find > Set Date Range or type a nonsense string into the Find Bar’s search box).
If your Keyword Tags pane is slow, here are some things to try:
- In Edit > Preferences > Keyword Tags And Albums, under Keyword Tag Display, try selecting the left option (no photo icon). This disables the thumbnail icon that by default displays next to each tag. It can greatly speed up expanding and collapsing of categories and scrolling of the pane.
- If you have 1,000 or more photos with assigned map locations (or imported GPS locations), the Keyword Tags pane and other basic operations in PSE become unusable. Often, if you never open Map View, PSE will operate normally. But if PSE continues to be sluggish even with Map View never opened during a session, the only solution I know of is to remove the map locations from the photos.
- Make sure your tags all have assigned icons (right-click the keyword tag, select Edit, and check the icon in the upper left). My tests have shown the Keyword Tags pane can become unusable if your tags don’t have icons. Normally, when you create a keyword tag, it will be assigned a thumbnail icon when you first assign the tag to a photo. But it is possible to create keyword tags without icons by importing XML files, and it may be possible that converting catalogs from early versions of Album/Elements creates tags with no icons.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you’re having problems converting a catalog from an earlier version of Photoshop Elements or Album to PSE 6 or later:
1. Read the appropriate Adobe tech note:
PSE 8: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/515/cpsid_51536.html
PSE 7: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404990.html
PSE 6: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402592.html
These notes omit some important steps. Before attempting to convert a catalog,
be sure to
- Reconnect or delete all missing files by doing File > Reconnect > All Missing.
- Repair the catalog by doing File > Catalog > Recover (PSE 5 and earlier) or File > Catalog > Repair followed by File > Catalog > Optimize (PSE 6 or later).
2. If you’re moving to a new computer at the same time as upgrading to a new version of PSE, it can greatly simplify troubleshooting if you do it in steps: Install the new version of PSE on the old computer, convert the catalog to that version, and then move the catalog to the new computer. Alternatively, install the old version of PSE on the new computer, move the catalog to the new computer (in the old version of PSE), and then convert to the new version of PSE.
3. If you’re converting from version 4 or earlier, you may need to first convert to PSE 5 and then from PSE 5 to the later version. The free trial of PSE 5 is no longer available from Adobe, but if you contact me at the email address at the top, I may be able to help you find one. If you can’t find a free trial of PSE 5, see step 8 for working around possible issues with version sets (“_edited” files).
4. If you’re converting from PSE 6 or later to an even later version (e.g. 7 to 8) and the conversion log (see step 8 below) shows the error “catalog copy failed”, you may have a large number of photos stored inside the catalog folder. As the first step in the conversion, PSE will try to copy the entire catalog folder, including any contained photos, and if it thinks there isn’t enough disk space, it will fail with that cryptic message.
To check this, in the old version do Help > System Info for the location of your catalog folder. Then in Windows Explorer, navigate to that folder and see if there are any photos stored in it or in subfolders.
To fix this, you’ll need to create a new catalog folder somewhere and copy the contents of the old catalog folder (except for photos and subfolders with photos) into the new folder. Then double-click the copy of “catalog.pse*db” in that new folder, which will open the old PSE on that copy and verify that it works. Finally, start the new PSE and redo the catalog conversion, being sure to convert the new copy, not the original.
5. Another cause of “catalog copy failed” is trying to place the newly converted catalog into a subfolder of the old catalog. If you’ve selected a Custom Location for your catalogs in the File > Catalog window, make sure that custom location is not a folder containing your old catalog. You can verify that you’re not doing this by looking at the first lines of the conversion log (see below for how to find the conversion log).
6. If you’re converting from PSE 6 or later, run the free utility psedbtool to see if there are any inconsistencies in the catalog created by bugs in PSE’s handling of drives. Those inconsistencies may be causing the conversion to fail. The documentation for “psedbtool” explains your options for handling the inconsistencies,
7. Try using the File > Backup command to make a backup of your catalog in the old version of PSE. Then use File > Restore in the new PSE to restore the backup, which will automatically convert the catalog at the same time. Some people have reported that this worked for them. Note that doing a backup/restore will copy all your photos into the backup and then copy them from the backup back to wherever you specify in the restore. It should be ok to restore to their original location, but it could take a while as PSE copies photos from the backup and overwrites each in turn. See this Adobe tech note for how to use backup/restore:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402894.html
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp\pse-conversion-log*.txt
Windows 7/Vista: C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\pse-conversion-log*.txt
(You may need to configure Windows Explorer to view hidden files.)
Sometimes the poison file is the last file listed in the conversion log, but sometimes the log will show the most recent file that was successfully processed. In this case, the log won’t show the poison filename, but it will often be in the same folder or have a modification time immediately following that of the last shown file.
Some people have reported that the conversion from Photoshop Album catalogs can trip up on “_edited” files in versions sets. Replacing the version set with a single file using Edit > Replaced Original With Deleted may work around this, but you’ll lose the original file. Deleting the edited files from the catalog (but not the hard drive) has worked for some people, as has converting to PSE 5 first (see above).
If the log files don’t help, as a last resort you can try “divide and conquer” to identify a poison file. In the old version of PSE/PSA, find the location of your catalog file (do Help > System Info, or look at the Adobe tech notes in step 1). The file will end in “.psa” (PSE 5 or earlier), “.psedb” (PSE 6), or “.psevdb” (substitute 7/8 for v). Then use these steps:
Save away a copy of the catalog file (very important!). Delete the second half of the photos from the catalog (but not from disk) and try converting. If the conversion fails, you know a poison file is in the first half of the catalog; if the conversion succeeds, the poison file is in the second half. Repeat this process on the half that fails to convert, saving away a new copy of the catalog file at each step. In “just” 15 steps, you can identify the poison file in a catalog with 32,000 photos.
9. If the previous steps all fail, a last resort is to write the metadata from your old catalog (tags, captions, notes, dates/times, star ratings) into your photos and then import them into a new PSE catalog. You’ll lose all your projects and albums, version sets will be converted into stacks, and you’ll probably lose at least some of your metadata, but this is better than nothing. See Merging catalogs for details on how to “merge” your old catalog into a new PSE catalog.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
On startup of the PSE Organizer, you may see an “updating” windows that appears for as long as ten or fifteen minutes, preventing you from using the Organizer. There are two different updaters, each requiring a different workaround:
1. The Adobe Updater that updates Adobe software on your computer. The title of this window is “Adobe Updater”. Usually you can simply cancel the update. To change the frequency with which PSE checks for updates, do Help > Updates, wait until the check for updates completes and tells you “There are no updates available at this time”, and click Preferences. Note that Adobe has not used this mechanism to provide updates for the last several versions of PSE, so there is no harm in disabling it.
2. The Watch Folders updater. The title of this window is “Adobe Photoshop Elements”, and in the window it says “Updating…” with a progress bar and a numeric percentage shown. The Watch Folders feature is enabled in your PSE, and this window shows the progress of incorporating changes to watched folders into your catalog. Sometimes this update can take a very long time, and there is no Cancel button to stop it.
The only known workaround is to disable the Watch Folders feature. Go to File > Watch Folders and uncheck Watch Folders And Their Sub-Folders For New Files; then restart PSE.
If that doesn’t work, try disabling the Windows service that implements the watching. In Windows, do Start > Control Panel > Classic View > Administrative Tools > Services. Click the line that says Adobe Active File Monitor Vv (substitute 6, 7, or 8 for v) and click Stop. Then right-click the same line and select Properties. Set the Startup Type to Manual. Restart PSE.
If this doesn’t help, please let me know – this problem occurs infrequently and this solution hasn’t worked for everyone.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the command Share > More Options > Share To Flickr / Kodak Easyshare / SmugMug / CEIVA is not available, there are two possible workarounds:
1. If you’re residing in a county other than the US or Canada, then in Edit > Preferences > Adobe Partner Services, under Location, change your country to United States And Canada. Then under Check For Services, click Refresh, and under Settings, click Reset Accounts and Clear Online Service Data. Restart PSE.
2. See this Adobe tech note:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403063.html
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The Organizer’s Display > Folder Location view often shows the wrong contents of folders.
One known bug is trying to use Folder Location view while viewing the results of a search, for example, by clicking on particular keyword tags. The results are often wrong. Clicking Show All in the Find bar can cause the correct contents of folders to display again.
But many people have reported Folder Location view showing incorrect contents even when viewing all images (i.e. after clicking Show All). Some people have reported that the following sometimes corrects the problem:
- Restarting PSE.
- Changing to Thumbnail View and then back to Folder Location view.
One tip: Folder Location view doesn’t show a subfolder unless it contains at least one photo in the catalog. So to expose a subfolder, place a dummy photo in it and import it.
If you rely on Folder Location view for your organizing workflow and thus find these problems seriously limiting, you might reconsider your use of the Organizer. The Organizer is designed around the idea of using keyword tags, dates/times, star ratings, captions, camera metadata, etc. for organizing and searching your catalog. These features are much more powerful and easy to use than folders. But if you really want a folder-based workflow, you may be better off with a tool designed for that (e.g. Adobe Bridge or Faststone).
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
As you use the Organizer, you might notice many photos in your recycle bin, even though you haven’t deleted them from your catalog. Don’t worry, this is normal, and you can safely empty your cycle bin without fear of losing photos.
The situations in which PSE uses the recycle bin are complicated. In general, PSE will sometimes put a photo into the recycle bin as part of implementing the Undo command. There are two situations in which it does this:
- When you delete a photo from the catalog and tell PSE to also delete it from your hard disk.
- When you give a command that changes the file’s metadata, and the metadata changes in length, e.g. when you change a caption.
In these situations, PSE puts the original file in the recycle bin. If you then do Undo, PSE will retrieve the original from the recycle bin.
For example, if you change a photo’s caption and the length of the caption changes, PSE puts the original photo in the recycle bin. If you do Undo, that original is retrieved. But if you change a single letter of the caption, its length doesn’t change, and the original is not put into the recycle bin. Similarly, the first time you do Adjust Date And Time on a photo fresh from a camera, the file doesn’t have an XMP metadata section, so PSE adds one; the length of the metadata thus changes and it puts the original file in the Recycle Bin. But subsequent Adjust Date And Time commands won’t put copies into the recycle bin.
If PSE decides to use the recycle bin, and you empty it, then Undo won’t be able to undo the delete or the change to the file’s metadata. But it will still be able to undo the corresponding change in the catalog. For example, if you change a photo’s caption to be longer and then empty the recycle bin, the Undo command will restore the original caption in the catalog but not in the file’s metadata. (Note that if PSE doesn’t use the recycle bin when changing metadata, it will always be able to undo the change to the file’s metadata.)
Thus, if you empty the recycle bin, you may lose the ability for Undo to undo a change to a file’s metadata. But you can always give the File > Write Keyword Tag command to update the metadata with the information in your catalog.
The following commands change a file’s metadata immediately: Adjust Date And Time, changing captions or notes, Place On Map, Remove From Map, Write Keyword Tag And Properties Info. (Note that when you invoke the Editor from the Organizer, the file’s metadata will also be written, but the original file doesn’t get placed in the recycle bin.)
The following commands don’t change a file’s metadata: Assigning or deleting keyword tags, changing the star rating.
I haven’t fully tested PSE 7 or 8, but I think it likely behaves similarly to PSE 6.
[PSE
6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you preview a slide show (created with Create > Slideshow) by using the Play button or the Full Screen Preview command, and none of the photos show (the preview is all black), and if you’re on Windows 7 or Vista, then you may need to run PSE as administrator. Right-click the Photoshop Elements icon on your desktop or in the Windows Start Menu that you use to start PSE, and select Run As Administrator. (Note that on Windows 7 and Vista, running a program as administrator is different than running the program in an account that is a member of the administrators group.)
If that solves the problem, you can tell Windows to always run PSE as administrator by right-clicking the icon, selecting Properties, clicking the Compatibility tab, and checking the option “Run this program as an administrator”.
If running as administrator doesn’t help, some people have reported success with uninstalling previous versions of PSE and manually removing remaining traces left behind by the installer.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the Organizer crashes when you try to do Share > E-mail Attachments or Share > Photo Mail, try running PSE as administrator, as described here. This has been confirmed to fix crashes when you’ve configured PSE to use Windows Mail on Vista (via Edit > Preferences > Sharing), but it might fix other crashes as well.
[PSE 6, 7, 8?]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The PSE uninstaller doesn’t completely remove all traces of PSE – it can leave behind various configuration and temporary files that may be corrupted. When you reinstall PSE, these files are still there and could cause the newly installed PSE to misbehave. To remove all traces of PSE, follow these steps:
1. Uninstall PSE using Windows’ Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs (XP) or Control Panel > Programs And Features (Windows 7/Vista).
2. Whether or not step 1 succeeded, run the CS3Clean Script:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402767.html
Even though the page doesn’t mention Photoshop Elements, it is appropriate for use with PSE.
3. Whether or not step 1 succeeded, follow the instructions in this tech note:
PSE 6: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/408/kb408483.html
PSE 7: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405847.html
4. Delete the following folders and files (you may need to configure Windows Explorer to view hidden files):
AD\Adobe\AIR
AD\Adobe\Camera Raw
AD\Adobe\Online Services
AD\Adobe\Photoshop Elements Sync
Agent
AD\Adobe\Save For Web PSE
AD\Adobe\XMP
AD\Adobe\Photoshop Album\contacts.xml
LS\Adobe\CameraRaw
LS\Adobe\Fonts
LS\Adobe\TypeSpt
LS\Adobe\TypeSupport
PD\Adobe\AIR
PD\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\7.0 (or
6.0)
PD\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\File
Agent
PD\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\Organizer
PD\Photoshop
Album\Settings\contacts.xml
In the paths above, make the following substitutions:
Windows 7,Vista:
AD => C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming
LS => C:\Users\user\AppData\Local
PD => C:\ProgramData
XP: AD => C:\Documents and
Settings\user\Application Data
LS => C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings
PD => C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data
user => your Windows username
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the colors in your photos appear OK when viewed in other programs but look wrong in PSE, you may have a bad color profile associated with your display in Windows. To diagnose this quickly, try temporarily disassociating the profile from your display:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942632
Some people have reported problems removing a display profile, and some have reported that Windows show no profile is associated with their display, even though PSE’s colors are clearly wrong. In this case, try associating the “sRGB” profile with your display. On Vista or Windows 7, in the Color Management control panel:
1. Make sure Use My Settings is selected and your Display is showing in the Device box.
2. Click Add.
3. Select the profile "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" and click OK.
4. Back at the Color Management window, select the profile you just added and click Set As Default Profile.
5. Restart PSE.
If you’re satisfied with the results of removing the bad profile, you can then leave the display as is. If you want better control over the colors shown on your display or in your prints, you’ll probably want to calibrate your display and turn on color management for your prints. That’s a huge topic, but here’s a good introduction for PSE users:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/colin_w/colour%20problems.htm
Note that there’s a known bug with photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB: Their colors show correctly in the Editor but not the Organizer.
You could also avoid the bad display color profile by setting Edit > Color Settings to No Color Management. I strongly discourage that: That will remove the color profiles from all the images that you edit, making it more likely they will display incorrectly on other computers and devices, especially on Macs. The color profiles on photos that you import will be also be discarded, making it more likely they will be displayed incorrectly.
[PSE 6, 7]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The duration
of a video clip included in a Slide Show is set to the default duration (e.g. 5
seconds), not the length of the video clip, and right-click Edit Duration
doesn’t change the clip’s duration. PSE doesn’t enable the command to change
the duration of video clips. But you can work around this by using Add Media
> Photos And Videos From Folder to add the clip to
the show. This bug appears to be fixed in PSE 8.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
There are two commonly used methods for backing up your catalog and photos: PSE’s File > Backup command and using a general-purpose backup program. Both can do a good job of backing up your catalog, but they have their pros and cons. Adobe also markets syncing with Photoshop.com (PSE 7/8) as “online backup”, but that’s very limited and I don’t recommend it.
PSE’s Backup command. The PSE backup command is simple and, for most people, easy to use. But it has some problems:
- You need to remember to run it (many people procrastinate).
- It doesn’t backup the audio for slide-show projects.
- You can’t easily restore relative pathnames of your folder hierarchy to new locations (e.g. you can’t restore c:\users\ellis\pictures\f1\p2.jpg to c:\users\john\pictures\f1\p2.jpg – you’ll get c:\users\john\pictures\users\ellis\pictures\f1\p2.jpg).
- When you do a restore, it creates folder hierarchies that can confuse the catalog conversion process when updating to a new version of PSE (but there are workarounds for this).
- It doesn’t backup the “syncdb” subfolder of the catalog folder, which remembers the state of your catalog’s synchronization with Photoshop.com. A restored catalog won’t know that it was synchronized with your Photoshop.com account, and PSE will download duplicates of all your photos into your catalog and upload duplicates to Photoshop.com.
General-purpose backup. Once set up, a general-purpose backup will run automatically, and you never need to remember to run it. If you’re backing up to an external drive, it will automatically manage the disk space, removing old backups. You have more flexibility about where to restore your folder hierarchies. And of course, you can backup all your files, not just PSE. On the other hand, setting up a general-purpose backup correctly can take some computer expertise. You need to ensure that you’re backing up all your photos and your catalog folder (do Help > System Info in the Organizer to find its location). When you restore from such a backup, you may need to reconnect your catalog with the new locations of your photos, and it can take some patience to coax the PSE Reconnect command to reconnect all your photos.
Syncing with Photoshop.com. Though Adobe markets the syncing as an online backup feature, the backup is pretty limited:
- It is too slow to be practicable with more than a couple hundred photos. If you add or change hundreds of photos, it could take days for the backup to catch up.
- It doesn’t backup version sets, stacks, changes to the order of photos in albums, audio captions, projects (e.g. slide shows), or keyword categories and subcategories (PSE 8 syncs keyword categories/subcategories).
- It will mangle dates/times with unknown month/day/time values.
- It can lose dates/times of photos that appear in more than one album (fixed in PSE 8).
- If you have to restore, you’ll lose some original filenames (fixed in PSE 8) and all your folder structure.
- Adobe is very slow to fix even basic problems with Photoshop.com. Do you want to entrust your backups to a company that takes years to fix basic bugs?
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If the Help command does not work and you have PSE 6, you can try downloading a patch from Adobe as described in solution 1 of this tech note:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402707.html
However, be aware that the installed Help content in PSE 6/7/8 is highly abbreviated, missing most of the details you’re looking for, with many commands not documented at all.
Rather than waste your time trying to get the Help command to work, I recommend that you use either the unabridged online Help at Adobe’s site or download the full User Guide (as PDF):
PSE 8 Organizer: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ElementsOrganizer/8.0/Win/Using/index.html
PSE 8 Editor: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/8.0/Win/Using/index.html
PSE 7: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/7.0_Win/index.html
PSE 6: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/photoshop_elements/
Note that in PSE 7/8, the Help command takes you to the unabridged online Help if your computer has an Internet connection; otherwise, it shows you the abbreviated installed Help content.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Adobe no longer includes the full PSE User Guide, at least in downloaded installations of PSE. However, you can access the guide online or download it to your computer as PDF.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you want to access your catalog from multiple computers, there are several viable approaches, depending on your needs. In each of these, you can only access the catalog from one computer at a time. I recommend that you only attempt these if you are comfortable and experienced administering computers, especially with approaches 1, 3, and 4.
1.
Keep
the main catalog on your desktop, work on new photos on your laptop, and
periodically merge from the laptop to the desktop.
This approach would be suitable if you want to take your laptop on trips, downloading, editing, and tagging photos as you go. On the laptop, you keep a small “working” catalog with your complete tag hierarchy but only the new photos you’ve added (PSE has a command that lets you export and import tag hierarchies). When you get home, you copy the photos back to the desktop and import them into your main catalog. See Merging catalogs for a complete discussion of how to do this.
2.
Store
your catalog and photos on an external hard drive.
If you keep your catalog and all your photos on an external hard drive, you can move the drive from computer to computer. Though external hard drives (especially the portable ones) can be significantly slower than internal drives, many people have been satisfied with the performance of PSE on such drives. If you travel extensively using such a drive, be sure you have regular backups on yet another drive, because traveling can be tough on an external drive.
To move your catalog to an external drive, use the File > Catalog > Move command. To move your photos, see Move your photos to another location.
3.
Keep
copies of your catalogs and photos synced on the two computers.
In this approach, you keep a copy of your catalog and photos on each computer. When you want to switch from one computer to the other, you use a third-party utility such as SmartSync Pro or Microsoft’s SyncToy to sync the catalog and photos folders on the new working computer.
In general, this will only work if you keep the photos in the exact same location on each computer. For example, on each computer you could make a new folder, c:\pse, and store your catalog in c:\pse\catalogs and your photos in c:\pse\photos. When you want to sync, you’ll have to have both computers on the same network, with one computer accessing the other via a shared network drive.
See approach 2 for how to move your catalog and photos.
4.
Store
your catalog and photos on a shared network drive.
See Storing the catalog and photos on a network drive for details. I strongly recommend not trying this unless you have prior experience with Windows networking.
5.
Sync
the two computers’ catalogs with the same account on Photoshop.com.
You can configure PSE on the two computers to sync their catalogs via Photoshop.com (via Edit > Preferences > Backup/Synchronization). Though Adobe markets this feature, I don’t recommend it, since syncing with Photoshop.com has a number of serious problems.
[PSE
6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not
being maintained and may be out-of-date
Setting unknown month, day, and time values with Edit > Adjust Date And Time has a number of problems, and I recommend not doing so:
- PSE has a number of bugs in its handling of unknown date/time.
- Adobe has shown no interest over several years of fixing these issues in PSE.
- Most other programs don’t know how to interpret unknown values recorded by PSE in photos’ metadata and will display them incorrectly.
Instead, I use the convention of using 12:00 AM for unknown times, and 1/1 12:00 AM for unknown month, day, and time.
Details
The EXIF standard doesn’t allow for specifying an unknown value for month, day, or time, but PSE goes ahead and writes non-conforming values into the EXIF DateTimeOriginal field anyway. Here is what PSE records in EXIF DateTimeOriginal for various date/time/values set with PSE:
|
PSE |
DateTimeOriginal |
|
9/21/1982 5:35 PM |
1982:09:21
17:35:00 |
|
9/21/1982 |
1982:09:21
00:00:00 |
|
9/1982 |
1982:09: 00:00:00 |
|
1982 |
1982: :
00:00:00 |
The first two forms, with full date and time, have a meaning specified by the
standard, but the second two forms don’t, and it’s arbitrary how different
programs may interpret those forms. Even
different parts of PSE itself interpret those non-standard forms
differently. For example, the Properties
– Metadata shows the second form as “9/20/1982 5:00 PM” (when in the PST time
zone.)
There is another section of metadata stored in a file, called XMP, a standard defined by Adobe and being widely adopted by industry. The XMP section also stores a DateTimeOriginal field, and a recent revision of the XMP standard does explicitly define how to store unknown values for month, date, and time. Unfortunately, not all programs understand XMP, and even those that do, such as Windows 7/Vista Windows Explorer, don’t implement the recent revision for handling unknown values.
Note, however, that PSE does correctly store dates/times with unknown values both in its catalog and in the XMP file metadata. However, there are a number of bugs in PSE’s handling of unknown values, including:
- Searching with date ranges doesn’t properly handle time “unknown”.
- Photoshop.com shows incorrect dates/times for files with unknown values synced from PSE.
- Thumbnail View incorrectly orders files with unknown values.
- Edit > Adjust Date And Time doesn’t clear EXIF:DateTimeOriginal if you set a date/time to all unknown values.
- The Properties – Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the month, day, or time is unknown.
- Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time “unknown” decrements the date by one day.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The retail license of PSE allows it be used on up to two computers, but only one at a time. For example, the PSE 7 license says:
2.4 Portable or Home Computer Use. Subject to the important restrictions set forth in Section 2.5, the primary user of the Computer on which the Software is installed under Section 2.1 (“Primary User”) may install a second copy of the Software for his or her exclusive use on either a portable Computer or a Computer located at his or her home, provided that the Software on the portable or home Computer is not used at the same time as the Software on the primary Computer. You may be required to contact Adobe in order to make a second copy.
You can find copies of the license at:
PSE 8: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 8.0\Legal\en_us
C:\Program
Files\Adobe\Elements Organizer 8.0\Legal\en_us
PSE 7: C:\Program
Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Legal\en_us
PSE 6: C:\Program
Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 6.0\Legal\en_us
Like other Adobe products, PSE 8 enforces the restrictions by requiring you to “activate” your license over the Internet – be sure to “deactivate” it before you uninstall it,
Earlier versions of PSE don’t require activation and don’t enforce the license restrictions – that’s between you and your conscience.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If you suspect that the Organizer isn’t showing all your photos:
1. Do Display > Thumbnail View (Folder Location view has many bugs and doesn’t always show the correct contents of folders).
2. Click Show All in the Find bar (if it’s visible).
3. Find > Clear Date Range.
4. In View > Media Types, ensure all types are checked.
5. Ensure View > Hidden Files > Show All Files is checked.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
PSE shows you a number of dates/times, and it can be very confusing. The following is based on PSE 7 behavior (other versions could vary from this).
1. There are the dates/times of the file itself, which are maintained by Windows for all files, not just photos. In the Organizer, these are shown on the Properties – Metadata tab under File Properties:
- Date Created is the date/time when the file was created by Windows or a program.
- Date Modified is when the file was modified by Windows or a program.
It appears that when Windows or a program copies a file, the Date Created is set to the date/time the file is copied, while the Date Modified is copied from the original file. That’s how it’s possible to get a Date Created newer than Date Modified.
2. There are the metadata dates/times of the photo, which are stored in the so-called “EXIF” section of the photo. Some (but not all) of these dates/times are shown in the Organizer on the Properties – Metadata tab under Camera Data (Exif). These dates/times are maintained by the various programs that manipulate photos; though there are industry standards governing EXIF metadata, most programs follow those standards only loosely, and they can differ in their interpretation:
· The EXIF Date Time is supposed to be when the file was changed, and you would expect it would be the same as the Windows Date Modified. But PSE doesn’t appear to always maintain that field properly.
· The EXIF Date Time Digitized is when the photo was converted to digital form. This may be different from when the photo was taken if film was used.
· The EXIF Date Time Original is when the photo was originally taken (when you pressed the shutter). This is where the date set by Edit > Adjust Date And Time gets stored and is the date shown under a thumbnail in the Organizer.
3. There are the dates/times in the Organizer on the Properties – History tab:
- Modified Date is the Windows file Date Modified.
-
Imported
On is the date the file was imported into the PSE catalog. This date is
stored only in the catalog itself, not the file.
4. The Editor’s File > File Info command shows the metadata in more detail. Click on Advanced, and then expand Exif Properties. The exif:DatTimeOriginal and exif:DateTimeDigitized fields has the same meaning as explained above. But due to bugs and inconsistencies in how PSE presents the metadata, they may not always have the same values as in the Organizer’s Properties tab.
Beware: The industry standards governing metadata in general, and dates/times in particular, are messy and changing, and most programs, including PSE and Windows, have minor and major bugs in their implementation of these standards.
The most authoritative tool for examining photo metadata is Exiftool (Google it). It’s a command-line tool that requires a bit of time to learn, but it widely considered to be the best, least-buggy tool out there for knowing what’s really in your files. ExiftoolGUI is supposedly a windowed version built upon Exiftool.
If you’re using unknown month, day, or time values in the Edit > Adjust Date And Time command, you’ll likely run into problems.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Sometimes the Organizer will silently lose the date/time of a file that you’ve set with Edit > Adjust Date And Time. This can happen when you invoke the full Editor, Edit > Update Thumbnail, or File > Reconnect. Variants of this bug have been present in at least the last several versions of PSE.
When you adjust the date and time of a photo, PSE normally writes the new date/time back to the metadata stored in the photo as well as storing it in your catalog. When you invoke one of the commands listed above, PSE rereads the date/time recorded in the file’s metadata, overwriting whatever is in the catalog. While there is no reason for PSE to do that, normally it’s not a problem, since the date/time in the metadata is the same as that in the catalog.
However, PSE sometimes silently fails to update the photo’s metadata with the new date and time. When it does, the catalog has the new time but the metadata has the old one. Thus, when you invoke the editor, PSE will read the old time from the file’s metadata and overwrite the new time stored in the catalog.
Here are known cases in which PSE fails to write the new date/time to the file’s metadata, along with some workarounds:
1. The file may not be of a type that supports metadata (e.g. BMP).
2. The file’s type may support metadata but PSE doesn’t know how to update it (e.g. Quicktime).
For cases 1 and 2, you need to convert the file to another file type that PSE can handle.
3. Due to bugs, PSE can’t update the metadata of some JPEGs and TIFFs produced by various cameras and scanners.
A workaround that often works for this case: After adjusting a photo’s date/time, select that photo and do File > Write Keyword Tags before invoking the one of the problem commands. The Write Keyword Tags command itself has bugs, so if that doesn’t help, you could use the free utility psedbtool to get the file’s metadata correctly written.
4. The file could be marked readonly or your account may not have permissions to update it. Change the permissions of the file.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
When you do a search, say for a keyword tag, the Organizer may show you files that don’t match your search exactly. Some of those files will have a blue-circle-with-a-checkmark icon, representing close matches, and some will have a red-circle-with-a-slash icon, representing non matches.
Close matches are files that match on some but not all of the search criteria. For example, if you search for the keyword tags A and B, a file tagged with A but not B will be shown as a close match. You can suppress close matches for any one search by doing Options > Hide Close Match Results in the Find bar. Uncheck the option Edit > Preferences > Show Closely Matching Sets For Searches to permanently hide close matches.
Non matches are files that don’t match any of the search criteria but that PSE has chosen to show anyway. When a search matches a photo in a stack or version set, the entire stack or version set is included in the search results. If the search matches the top photo of the stack/set, it is shown collapsed. Otherwise, it is shown expanded, and photos in the stack/set not matching the search are shown with the red circle-slash.
Unfortunately, there is no way to suppress non matches from search results, which many users find very annoying. This behavior makes it impossible to search and select photos meeting a given criteria. Some actual use cases from the Adobe forums:
Someone edited his raw files and saved them in version sets as JPEGs. He wanted to move just the raw files offline, to free up disk space. But there’s no way to find and select just the raw files -- if you do Find > By Details > File Type Is Camera Raw, the JPEGs in the version sets will also be displayed (with a red circle-slash).
Someone wanted to find and select just those photos with 5 stars, including photos that were in stacks.
If your stacks have more than one “best” photo, or different photos in the stack have different keyword tags, you’re not using stacks as they were intended by Adobe, and you may find it easier to use keyword tags instead.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Photos that appear properly rotated (landscape or portrait) in PSE may appear incorrectly rotated in other programs and services. The problem is that PSE, newer cameras, and other newer programs rotate a photo using an industry-standard orientation field in the photo’s metadata; rather than rotating the photo proper, they just change that field. Unfortunately, many programs and services, including Adobe’s Photoshop.com, don’t recognize that field.
You can work around this problem by forcing the PSE Organizer to rotate the actual photo rather than changing the field:
1. In the PSE Organier, go to Edit > Preferences > Files.
2. Uncheck the options Rotate JPEGs/TIFFs Using Orientation Metadata.
3. For the photos that don't appear oriented correctly, rotate them counterclockwise and then clockwise (you can do more than one at once).
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The difference between keyword tags, albums, and stacks can be confusing at first. Knowing the differences between them and how Adobe intended them to be used can make your organizing and searching easier.
Keyword tags let you define a particular set of photos, without any particular order. When you search by tag, the photos are shown ordered by date, newest or oldest first. Tags are best used for organizing your photos according to their content. For example, use tags to identify photos containing particular places, people, and events.
Albums (called “collections” in PSE 5) let you define a specific ordering for a set of photos. The photos in an album can be shown by album order or by date. Albums are best used only when you need to prepare a particular order for a particular set of photos, e.g. when you’re making a slide show or other presentation.
Some people try to use albums for their basic organizing as well, e.g. making a different album for each different person or each different event. But albums weren’t designed for this, and tags are a better solution. In particular, it’s easy to search for photos containing more than one tag, e.g. all photos containing both the “John” and “Jane” tags; and it’s easy to refine a tag search by date range. But it’s much clumsier to do that with albums – you need to use the Find > By Details command. Tags can also be written into a photo’s metadata and understood by many other programs and online services such as Flickr, whereas albums can’t. You also can’t stack photos when viewing the album contents.
Smart Albums are just saved search queries that get reissued each time you click on the smart album. Smart albums have nothing to do with regular albums, and the name “smart album” is quite misleading, since you can’t reorder photos in a smart album as you can with an album.
Stacks are similar to version sets and are intended for grouping similar versions of the same photo, where there is one “best” photo on the top of the stack. The PSE User Guide gives the following examples: “For example, create a stack to group together multiple photos of your family taken with the same pose; or, for example, photos taken at a sports event using your camera’s burst mode or auto-bracket feature.”
Some people try to use stacks instead of keyword tags to group disparate photos of the same subject (e.g. ten different photos of a wedding), and the stacks end up having many “best” photos buried inside the stack, with the photos having different keyword tags. Unfortunately, using stacks this way interacts badly with the Organizer’s search – if any photo inside a stack matches the search, all the photos in the stack are displayed in the search results, regardless of whether they match.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
NNN Read all of the
following carefully!!!
If you have problems importing or opening raw files in PSE, most likely it’s because you have the wrong version of the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plug-in installed or you made a mistake installing the correct version. Adobe updates the plug-in fairly often to handle new cameras, and PSE does not automatically update itself with the latest version.
If you have PSE 6 or later, you can download the latest version from
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
If you have an earlier version of PSE, see this tech note for how to determine which version of ACR is compatible with your PSE and whether it supports your camera:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/407/kb407110.html
Follow the manual installation instructions precisely! Unfortunately, Adobe does not provide an automatic ACR installer for use with PSE – if you don’t follow the instructions precisely, ACR won’t work. Adobe has been changing the download pages for ACR, so read them carefully and look for download links and/or instructions pertaining to PSE in particular. If you don’t read each entire page carefully, you’ll likely run into trouble.
Common mistakes include:
- Downloading the version intended for full Photoshop, rather than the one for PSE (read the download page carefully!).
- Leaving a renamed copy of the old Camera Raw.8bi plug-in in the Plug-Ins\File Formats folder or in a sub-folder. PSE will load every file it finds in the folder or sub-folder, regardless of its name.
- Extracting the 64-bit version of the plug-in rather than the 32-bit version. PSE only works with the 32-bit version (even on Windows 7/Vista 64-bit). If you can’t tell which is which in the .zip file you downloaded, extract the .zip into a temporary folder first – the 64-bit version will be in a clearly labeled sub-folder.
- Just running CameraProfiles.exe and not extracting the plug-in at all.
If you have problems, delete all versions of the Camera Raw.8bi plug-in from the Plug-Ins\File Formats folder and sub-folders and start over by re-downloading the plug-in and following the instructions more carefully. If you continue to have problems, see this tech note for troubleshooting:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/407/kb407110.html
Note that the Editor and Organizer use different rules for how to find and load ACR, so it is very possible that if you make a mistake, they will load different versions, and only one will work with your raw files. If that happens to you, delete all versions of plug-in and start over.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Some camera manufacturers insert the name of the camera in the caption field of a photo’s metadata, and when you import the photo into PSE, it shows up as a caption. To stop this from happening, uncheck the option Edit > Preferences > Files > Import EXIF Caption. To remove the caption from photos that have already been imported:
1. Do Find > By Caption Or Note and type in the name of the camera.
2. Edit > Select All.
3. Right-click one of the photos and select Add Caption To Selected Items.
4. Leave the caption field blank, check Replace Existing Captions, and click OK.
[PSE 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The PSE 8 System Requirements say that it will run on a 1024 x 567 display, but it will have crippled functionality on displays shorter than 768: Raw files will always open directly in the Editor, bypassing the Adobe Camera Raw editor, and the Advanced Dialog of the Adobe Photo Downloader isn’t available. There may be other restrictions as well? The restriction on ACR is particularly unfortunate on 1280 x 720 displays, a popular size for small widescreen notebooks. PSE 7 runs ACR just fine on a 1280 x 720 display, with just a small amount of the bottom of the window clipped.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
A number of people have reported that versions of PSE 5.0.2 and higher run fine on Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit). Some people have reported problems, but it's hard to know whether those problems are specific to Windows 7 (PSE has a fair number of problems on all versions of Windows). I've done limited testing of PSE 5 through 8 on Windows 7 32-bit. Running PSE in compatibility mode has fixed some PSE crashes on Windows 7.
As of 11/19/09, Adobe has not communicated whether they'll provide customer support for PSE 7 and earlier on Windows 7. Their support policies are very restrictive, and I'll bet that they won't. But on the other hand, Adobe customer support is generally of ragged value.
If you’re upgrading an existing Vista machine to Windows 7 with an “in-place” installation that doesn’t require you to backup your files and programs, then you won’t need to do anything special to preserve your catalog and photos. If you’re upgrading from XP or a non-compatible version of Vista, you’ll need to backup your files and programs (the Windows 7 installer will warn you of that). In this case, you should use PSE’s Backup to save your catalog and photos to another disk before you install Windows 7, and then use Restore to restore your catalog and photos after installing PSE on the new Windows 7, just as if you were moving your photos to another computer.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Many people have reported problems running older versions of PSE and Photoshop Album (PSA) running on newer versions of Windows. Adobe formally supports only PSE 8 on Windows 7 (though earlier versions usually run well), and PSE 5.0.2 through 8 on Vista.
Running the older version of PSE in Vista or XP Compatibility Mode often fixes these problems. To change the compatibility mode:
1. Right-click the PSE icon on your desktop or in the Start Menu and select Properties > Compatibility.
2. Select Run This Program In Compatibilty Mode For, and try the various versions of Vista and XP.
If you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you can download Virtual PC XP Mode (free) and run PSE in a true Windows XP virtual machine that runs on top of Windows 7:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/
This will allow you to run any version of PSE/PSA that ran on Windows XP.
[PSE 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The PSE 8 Auto-Analyzer has some severe problems, and I recommend that you never run it. It will corrupt your map locations, split your video clips into "scene groups" that are hard to get rid of, modify the date/time of every file, crash frequently, make your computer very sluggish, and litter your folders with temporary files:
- It will set the EXIF GPS location (the map location) to 0 degrees N, 0 degrees W for files not currently having locations.
- It will cause File > Write Keyword Tag to mangle the EXIF GPS Longitude Ref field of photos you later import (even if they weren’t auto-analyzed), and other programs may not be able to read those files’ GPS location.
- If you run it automatically when PSE starts, it will split your video clips into scene groups, and the only way to get rid of the split scenes is to reimport the clips (losing any tags, captions, notes, star ratings, and stacking).
- If you run it automatically when PSE starts, it will make a mostly harmless change to the metadata of all the analyzed files (adding an XMP section), changing the Windows date-modified of the files. But that can have two negative effects:
o If you later reimport analyzed video clips (e.g. because the Auto-Analyzer split your clips into scene groups), you’ll lose the original date/time, because PSE uses the date-modified as the date/time of the video.
o All the analyzed files will get backed up again, which can be painful with large catalogs, and especially painful if you’re using online backup.
- It can crash frequently.
- It will consume large amounts of CPU time to analyze large catalogs, especially some kinds of video files. While it is running, your computer may be very sluggish. For example, it took 260 seconds to analyze an 8 MB .wmv clip.
- It can litter your folders with temporary files of the form ._00_file.jpg that it forgets to delete.
Make sure you’ve disabled the Auto-Analyzer from running automatically via Edit > Preferences > Auto-Analyzer Options > Analyze All Media In Catalog Automatically.
[PSE 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
PSE 8 removed the zoom buttons from the Organizer’s Full Screen display (F11). You can use the standard shortcuts to zoom: Ctrl +, Ctrl -, Ctrl 0 (to fit to the display), Ctrl Alt 0 (zoom 100%), and the mouse zoom wheel. When zoomed in, the mouse cursor changes to a hand, and you can pan the photo with it. (Don’t feel bad, this is undocumented.)
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
If Photomerge Panorama fails with this error message:
Error: Unable to create window
- OS error
Line 364
-> var w = new window
( res );
try creating the panorama after each of these troubleshooting steps:
1. Restart the PSE Editor and Organizer.
2. Reboot.
3. Restart the Editor and open the files directly in the Editor with File > Open, rather than from the Organizer.
While this seems to work for many people, it may not work for everyone. On my PSE 8, the error occurs very intermittently and rebooting makes it go away.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
PSE imposes no fixed limit on the number of images in a catalog. Many people have reported catalogs as large as 25,000 images, a few have reported as large as 70,000, and one recently reported a catalog with 180,000 images! In general, there's no fixed limit, but you'll want to make sure you have lots of memory, at least 2 GB and preferably 4GB. Stay away from Map View (it just won't work). The Keyword Tags pane can get sluggish with the larger number of tags that usually come with larger catalogs -- see this FAQ for a workaround. Running File > Catalog > Repair followed by Optimize every month or so may help performance.
[PSE 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The face-recognition feature of PSE 8 can create duplicate tags when you type in a name to the “Who is this?” pop-ups that randomly appear over the image thumbnails about every 10 seconds. There are at least two conditions under which this occurs:
- When you type in the name of an already existing tag using different case. For example, you create a tag “Bob” with face recognition. Then for another face, you type “b”, PSE auto-completes that to “bob”, and then you hit enter – a new tag gets created.
- When you type in the name of an already existing tag that was not created by face recognition. For example, in the Keyword Tags pane you create a tag People > Family > Bob. Then in response to the pop-up, you type in “Bob” (same case) – a new tag gets created.
The workaround is to not use those “Who is this?” pop-ups, but rather do all your face-tagging by invoking the Find > Find People For Tagging command or by clicking the Start People Recognition button in the Keyword Tags Pane. This will ensure that your pre-existing tags are used and that duplicates aren’t created. You can turn off the pop-ups via Edit > Preferences > Keyword Tags And Album > Display Hints About People Recognized.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
PSE doesn't make using multiple catalogs easy, and as a result, I strongly recommend having a single catalog. If there are reasons you perceive for wanting multiple catalogs, there are often features or workarounds that would allow you to be comfortable with a single catalog. For example, PSE handles a 20,000-photo catalog as well as a 10,000-photo catalog. Judicious use of the Organizer’s tagging and date/time searching can make it very easy to find just the photos you want to work on.
Once you’ve started using multiple catalogs, it is hard to merge them together into a single catalog, so be very sure you want multiple catalogs.
That being said, the easiest way to "move" a photo into another catalog is to select its thumbnail in the Organizer, do File > Write Keyword Tag, import it into the new catalog, and delete it from the old catalog (without deleting it from disk). (Remember that catalogs don't really "contain" photos, they just contain links to the photos' locations.) But this won't preserve version sets, stacks, or albums, and because of bugs in Write Keyword Tag, you could lose some of your tagging, dates/times, captions, notes, star ratings, and GPS locations. See the utility psedbtool for how to get this metadata correctly written into the photos.
Alternatively, you can split a catalog into two or more separate catalogs. In the Organizer, do Help > System Info to find the location of the current catalog folder. In Windows Explorer, make a copy of that catalog folder and change the name of the folder to the name you want for the new catalog. In that new catalog folder, find the file "catalog.pse8db" (or .psedb/pse7db) and double-click it to open it in PSE. Then delete the photos you don't want in that new catalog (don't delete them from disk). Repeat to make other subsets of the original catalog. Due to bugs in PSE 6, this method can break projects (e.g. slide shows).
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The PSE Editor can display diagonal edges in images with ragged, pixilated edges – “the jaggies”. To avoid this, use a zoom level of 100%, 50%, 25%, or 12.5% -- any others can result in jaggies.
This has been a longstanding limitation of both full Photoshop and the PSE Editor. I've read that Photoshop CS4, the most recent version, finally fixes this by using the capabilities of mid- to high-end graphics chipsets to render images smoothly at any zoom level. But PSE doesn't include that feature.
I'm not a graphics expert, so I don't understand why it is that other programs can do fast smooth rendering at odd zoom levels, while Photoshop CS3 and PSE can't. There may well be valid engineering reasons.
[PSE 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
A number of people have noticed that the automatic face recognition at first works pretty well, but then starts recognizing fewer and fewer faces. There may be two different causes of this, both based on the fact that recognition is a statistical process:
- The recognizer has thresholds for when to “recognize” a face or make a suggestion. It first shows you all the faces that are above those thresholds, and then it shows the ones it can’t recognize. Thus it seems that, as you work through your catalog, the recognizing is performing worse.
- The recognizer appears to use an inappropriate algorithm for “learning” faces. As you tag more instances of a given person, you’re providing the recognizer with more and more faces that are less “ideal” (see above), e.g. in partial or complete profile, bad lighting, too small, wearing a hat, etc. The recognizer adds the features of these less-than-ideal faces to its statistical profile of that person, and they “pollute” the profile, making it hard for it to recognize even a “good” instance of the face.
I’ve verified this by running the recognizer on several hundred faces of the same adult, taken over several years. Eventually, the recognizer can no longer recognize even the best instances of that person’s face.
One partial workaround to the second problem is to start using a new People tag for a person that’s no longer being recognized, e.g. “Jane Doe 2” instead of “Jane Doe”. Since PSE associates the facial features with the tag, the new tag won’t be polluted yet. The downside to this is that you now have two tags for the person, not one. You can merge the associated photos into one tag (click the old tag to show its photos, drag the new tag to them, delete the old tag), but you’ll then lose the identification of the face rectangles on the old tag’s photos.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Many of the troubleshooting steps require you to configure Windows Explorer to show hidden folders and files:
Windows 7, Vista: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404880.html
XP: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404856.html
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
On Windows 7, File > Get Photos And Videos > From Files And Folders can behave strangely with folders whose names contain periods, e.g. “christmas.2000”. When you click on such a folder, it and others can disappear from the window, and the Get Media box can be grayed out; there could also be strange flickering in the window. Some workarounds:
- Rename the folder to replace the period with a hyphen.
- Use File > Get Photos And Videos > By Searching.
- Import photos by dragging files or folders from Windows Explorer into the thumbnail area of the Organizer.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
Many people find the PSE user interface hard to read – the text is small and the grey-on-black color scheme makes it hard to see brushes, little arrows, and other parts of the interface. Adobe doesn’t seem to make readability a priority, even though an important part of PSE’s user base consists of older people like me with aging eyes. Here are some things you can do to improve readability somewhat:
- Adjust the brightness and contrast of your display using a grayscale chart like this:
http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
This can often improve the relative contrast between the different shades of grey in the user interface, making it easier to read. Even better is to calibrate your display using an inexpensive calibrator such as the Spyder.
- In PSE 7 and later, adjust the user-interface appearance in the Organizer and the Editor via Edit > Preferences General > Appearance Options (a slider in PSE 7, a “dark” and “light” choice in PSE 8). Many people report that this doesn’t help much, but it’s worth a try.
- Increase the text size in the Organizer and some of the text size in the Editor by increasing the Windows display DPI (dots per inch). Only some of the text in the Editor will increase in size, and you’ll have to apply this workaround in the Organizer to avoid a PSE bug. To increase the DPI:
a. On Windows 7, right-click the Windows desktop, select Personalize, click Display in the lower-left, and select 125% (or any size except 150%, which triggers a bug in PSE).
b. On Vista, right-click the Windows desktop, select Personalize, click Adjust Font Size, then click 120.
c. On XP, right-click the Windows desktop, select Properties, click Settings, Advanced, General, and in DPI Setting choose 120.
- In the Editor, selecting brushes can be particularly difficult. You can change the default display of brushes by clicking the brush dropdown, then click the black double right-arrow in the upper right of the drop-down (hard to see), and then selecting Stroke Thumbnail.
- Decrease your Windows display resolution (e.g. from 1280 x 1024 to 1024 x 768). You should do this only as a last resort, since you’ll lose all the advantages of having a higher-resolution display – your images will look grainy and pixilated and it will be harder to do editing of details.
[PSE 6, 7, 8]
This FAQ is not being maintained and may be out-of-date
The LR Library module is much more robust than the PSE Organizer, and
I expect that as long as LR remains successful, the Library will get decent
support from Adobe. Adobe markets LR to professionals and prosumers who manage
tens of thousands of photos, and library-based workflow is an essential element
of the LR design.
The LR Library is not perfect, however:
-
It
has a number of bugs, perhaps reflecting an overall trend of Adobe cutting back
on quality assurance. I haven’t found these bugs to be anywhere near as serious
as the PSE Organizer bugs, though. Most importantly, LR’s handling of photo
metadata appears much more robust than PSE’s.
-
Stacks
are second-class citizens and don’t interact well with collections – when
viewing a collection, all of your photos appear unstacked.
Since many advanced searching features are only available with smart
collections, this crimps your ability to use stacks.
-
The
library doesn’t handle PDFs, PNGs, GIFs, or audio. However, my Any File LR plugin does
allow these formats to be included in your catalog.
-
LR’s
support for video is very weak. It only handles some newer formats and codecs,
and even if you have an older codec installed on your computer, LR won’t use it
(e.g. older Quicktime codecs). Further, LR has poor
support for basic video metadata (capture date, caption, keywords, rating):
o
LR
recognizes .thm sidecar files but not .xmp sidecars.
o
LR
doesn’t write metadata back to either the files themselves (if their format
supports metadata) or to sidecars.
o
If
the video file doesn’t have a .thm sidecar, LR uses
the file’s created date rather than its modified date, which is a bad design,
since Windows changes the created date each time you copy the file.
o
LR
won’t let you edit the capture time.
Because
of these limitations, I use my Any File plugin to manage
all of my video clips. Jeffrey Friedl’s Video Asset Management
plugin is also a good choice – it provides access to more video-specific
metadata.
-
Windows
LR doesn’t work gracefully with keywords containing spaces; in particular, when
you’re typing keywords (the quickest way to tag photos), auto-completion won’t
work on words after the spaces. This is only a significant annoyance if you
have dozens of keywords with the same first word (e.g. “San” or “St.”). The Any Tag
plugin works around that problem, making it much easier to apply and filter
tags.
-
Unlike
PSE, there isn’t any mechanism to attach notes to keywords (as opposed to
photos). The Any Tag
plugin provides that ability.
LR 3 will convert a PSE
6, 7, 8, or 9 catalog via the File > Upgrade command, but there are a number
of issues to consider:
-
LR
3.0 had some blatant bugs with the conversion, fixed in LR 3.2. See this Adobe tech note for further known
limitations in converting PSE catalogs:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/855/cpsid_85517.html
-
If
you’ve included photos from different folders in the same stack, you’ll have to
move them into a single folder; strangely, LR can’t stack photos from different
folders.
-
Run
psedbtool -writeMetadata -qualifiedKeywords to write metadata correctly from your
PSE catalog to your files before you convert the catalog to LR. (Psedbtool doesn’t work with PSE 9.)
-
Infrequently,
PSE neglects to include the seconds in a photo’s date/time (this is allowed by
the XMP metadata standard), and LR’s Filter Bar incorrectly treats such a
date/time as “unknown”. The easiest (but
perhaps tedious) workaround is to use LR’s Metadata > Edit Capture Time to
change the dates. Alternatively, you
could use Exiftool to find and change these dates.
-
PSE
allows you to attach notes as well as captions to your photos, and to attach
notes to your keywords, while LR supports neither. After converting to LR, I
used Exiftool to append the XMP:Notes field to the XMP:Description
(caption) field of each photo, and then used LR’s Metadata > Read Metadata
From Files command. For notes attached
to keywords, I use Any Tag plugin, which can import keyword notes
from PSE.
-
If
you have an earlier version of PSE, you must first convert to PSE 6, 7, or 8
and then convert to LR. Look for a free tial of PSE
6-8 on the Web, and see
this FAQ for issues
with converting from earlier to later versions of PSE.
Copyright 2008-2010 by John R. Ellis