What do I do to continue to store photos in my PSE? Thank you.

Thanks for the reply. I didn’t realize that the catalog could be moved separately from the backup files. I thought that I needed the backup on the external drive in order to go between computers. I have been doing more research and tested my idea…and figured it out! I was able to move the catalog onto the EHD and use it on both the laptop and desktop.

Now I have a very disturbing issue with my pictures. They somehow got corrupted. Luckliy I have them all backed up on CD’s, which I will need to reload since I had not done a full PSE backup (still learning the ropes).

Thanks again,
Jaime

My first question/comment is why would you want both your pictures and catalog along with their backup on the same drive? If you lose the drive you lose everything.

Regarding your problem in the third paragraph, the error might be caused by your trying to restore your catalog to the ame drive. Again, I am not sure why you would want to do such a thing. Also, if you requested the same file structure, it seems like that would cause PSE 6 problems. If I understand you you are asking PSE to Restore the catalog right over itself. What am I missing here? There may be some other problem, however. I would hve expected PSE 6 to give you a more specific error message rather than the generic shutting down one.

Finally, your goal to share your catalog/pictures between to PCs accessing the same external HD is a common desire. Have you checked the Adobe User Forums? There have been several discussions there. Also, why not make a small test catalog and try your idea on it?

Hope this helps a little.

Don

I am using 32-bit Vista with Elements 6. I just got a new external hard drive and am trying to move all of my pictures and catalog, as well as the backup onto that drive. What I want to be able to do is use the hard drive on my desktop (Vista 32bit) and laptop (Vista 64bit) so that I can have all of my tags shown on both computers. I am assuming that if I have PSE installed on both computers, and I have all of my pics and the catalog on the external hard drive it should work. Am I correct?

I have already done the full backup onto the external hard drive. I went to file –> restore and chose a new location. The new location is the same external drive I just did the backup on. I used Browse and made a new folder for the restored files.

Here is the problem: Once I hit the Restore button, I get a Windows message that says that the program has an unknown error and needs to shut down….thus closing the program. I have no idea what I did wrong…any suggestions?

That’s true, as long as you external drive is connected, you will edit or whatever the full resolution picture that is stored there.

I had never had a problem with bad CDRs generated by PSE, because it used single session on in the early days, and I always had it Verify the data.

And so far, I have not had CDR/DVDs become unreadable in general due to age, but I periodically check them. With the recent changes in PSE, my photo CDR/DVDs have basically become my doomsday backups.

Don S.

I like your idea of a second internal drive, even though I don’t understand the part about PSE6 not making a copy of the full resolution image. When I look at or edit a photo in PSE6, which is stored on the external drive, the properties indicates that it is a full resolution photo. Maybe I just don’t understand the statement. But in any case, I have never been a fan of storing photos on DVD’s or CD’s, even though I did do that when I had Album2 and PSE2. CD’s are just too unreliable over the long term. I also want to have all my photos on the same storage medium, so that I can search all photos at once, using a combination of tags. A second internal drive or an external drive makes that possible. I now have 4 external drives, with the Catalog backed up on each one.

Let’s hope we go a long time now, without any more disasters.

Lenny

Thanks for the feedback. You are right, the PSE 4 Catalog needs to be converted to the PSE 6 format. But the conversion may fail or not be totally successful regarding the conversion of the tags if there are internal problems with the PSE 4 catalog. Pproblems that the user may not even be aware of.

Actually problem with going from PSE 5 to PSE 6 involved an entirely different issue. The conversion when fine in all respects.

But the vast majority of my 19K images were physically stored on CDs & DVDs, which had been accumulated since I had started using PSE 3 since it had been released. Actually, my I started my catalog using Photoshop Album, which preceded PSE 3.

That strategy (the bulk of my pictures being stored offline) worked quite well for me for versions 3-5 of PSE. I was able to make slide shows, view the pictures full screen, and even print a reasonably good 4×6 from the proxie that were stored on my hard drive, without ever needing to load the picture from its CD/DVD. I used the largest proxie size of 1280×960.

If I wanted to edit the offline picture, PSE told me want CD/DVD to insert.

When Adobe came out wiith PSE 6, they chose to change the way they handle offline media. In PSE 6 and PSE 7, let alone put the picture into a slide show etc. unless you have the CD/DVD loaded. This not a real problem, if your offline media is an external drive, wich is connected.

To me that meant I had to move all of my offline images back online – about 16k of them. If that was not bad enough, PSE 6 was unable to proerly identify many of the CD/DVDs, even though it had generated them. Somewhere in the version evolution identifying/name the CD/DVD rules changed.

Recovering from that was time consuming. Along the way, I chose to put my images onm a second internal drive ather thanm an external drive. It “appears” that PSE does not copy the full resolution image that is stored on an external drive, just its preview. One must back up the images on the external drive separately.

My backup catalog for about 21k pictures is about 100 Gb, but it includes everything.

Don

You must convert your existing catalog, rather than have 6.0 automatically make a new catalog for you.

1. Select File>Catalog
2. Click Convert. The convert Catalog dialog box opens and searches the default locations for the catalogs of Photoshop Elements.
3. (optional) To browse additional locations for catalogs, click Find More Catalogs, and browse to other locations.
4. Select a catalog from the list to convert, and click Convert.
5. Click Done, to close the Convert Catalog dialog box.

I had a scare today, when powering up my new LaCie drive, which is where I moved all of my photos to, to free up my small C-Drive. While powering up, the blue light in from kept on flashing and would not stop. Additionally, Windows XP did not recognize the drive. This went on for about an hour. In the meantime, I searched for the problem, and found that other people had seen it also, but had no solution. I called LaCie, and they had me unplug the Firewire connection first, then unplug the power cord, turn the power switch off, replug in the power cord, turn power back on, and reconnect the Firewire. It then worked properly, and no data was lost (yes, I did have the Catalog backed up to two other external drives).

Hope some of that is useful to somebody.

Lenny

I am glad you finally got your Catalog fully restored where you wanted. I certainly do not know what went wrong, but one thing I am sure of. Your experience is yet another example of the value of having multiple backups for your pictures. As good as PSE is, things still do not always go as expected.

For entirely different reasons, that I hope will never occur again, I had a terrible time going from PSE 5 to PSE 6. Adobe made a fundamental change in the way they handle off-line media, and I had evolved my workflow and storage strategy around how PSE 3 throught PSE 5 worked.

Enough said about that. But like you, it took me a long time to get things working right. If you are like me, I bet you are glad it’s over so you can get back to the fun part of working with your photos.

Don S.