I also just found this on a different forum (why are there two forums??): Elements 14: Tagging photos is not sticking in metadata | Photoshop Family Customer Community  Seems to indicate that this has been a problem since Elements 14. It's incredible to me that they released a whole new version without fixing this. ... View more

Douglas, I don't have a solution for you, but it seems like there are a lot of us with this problem. See this thread: Photoshop Elements 15: Tags do not write to metadata in their entirety, why would that be?  "Random" is exactly the right word. ... View more

Thanks, Michel. What happens when you: - select the three tags shown in the IPTC panel, delete and save the IPTC. - close the IPTC panel and open it again. Does the tags disappear completely? If you press Ctrl W now, and reopen the IPTC panel, do you get the same result, only 3 tags shown? Yes, same result. Only three tags shown - the same three as before. The person tags are shown in alphabetical order. What would happen if you edited temporarily the persons names by adding a leading 'A' or 'Z' letter? Would that change the persons tags displayed? Interesting idea. I prepended an A to Douglas's name, changing his place in the sort order, but he still wasn't added to the IPTC fields. Only Donna was, as before. I just went through a full exiftool dump of all metadata fields in a batch of photos, to see if I could find some pattern that would divide the photos that do accept all tags from those don't. Nope, seems utterly random. ... View more

And here's a screenshot showing an example. This is after adding the tags in Elements Organizer and saving metadata to file. As you can see, only three of the five tags were written. One of the people tags were written, and two were not. And no, the people tags are not "face tags" - there's no coordinate data. ... View more

Whoops, I was wrong. Sorry for the confusion. Turns out "face tags" do (normally) get exported as normal tags, I was just confused by (a) the inconsistent results I've been seeing, and (b) a misleading response from Adobe staff elsewhere on the forum. Red herring central. To give a bit more background, the problem is that some tags don't get written to some files, but there's no consistency about which tags don't get written to which photos. That is, the tag Bob Dole might get written to photo A but not Photo B, whereas the tag Newt Gingrich will get written to Photo B but not Photo A. But the crazy thing, to me, is that after using exiftool to completely wipe existing metadata, the same tags would not write to the same files. So, it seems like there are at least three of us with the same problem. In the absence of any help from Adobe, perhaps we can figure out what we have in common, since it doesn't sound like this bug is universal. Here's what I'm working with: File types: TIFF Catalog lives on a shared network drive, accessed by three different workstations. ESET Endpoint Security antivirus The rest is from Help / System Info: Elements Organizer 15.0.0.0 Core Version: 15.0 (20160905.m.97630) Language Version: 15.0 (20160905.m.97630) Current Catalog: Catalog Name: Shared PE Catalog - faculty photos Catalog Location: Y:\Archive\Faculty Photo Project\Shared PE Catalog - faculty photos\ Catalog Size: 17.6MB Catalog Cache Size: 76.4MB System: Operating System Name: Windows 7 Operating System Version: 6.1 Service Pack 1 System Architecture: Intel CPU Family:6 Model:5 Stepping:1 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2 Built-in Memory: 7.9GB Free Memory: 2.7GB ... View more

Thanks Michel, I appreciate your thoughts. They inspired me to go back and dig deeper, and I think I have the answer, at least to what I'm seeing, described in detail here: Some tags not saving with "Save metadata to file"  Not sure if this is the same thing as the OP here, and I don't want to hijack the thread, but I will note that one thing that kept me from identifying the problem for so long is that people tags get saved correctly, whereas "face tags" apparently do not, and there's no good way in PSE to tell the difference. Michel, turns out that you are very wise to steer clear of the facial recognition. What a poorly implemented feature. ... View more

Well, back to the drawing board. My theory below turns out to be incorrect. I just added two tags to a photo: a "face tag" and a people tag. Both were saved to the file. Which is good in a way, but brings me back to the drawing board as far as why some tags aren't getting saved. In my defense, I was misled by Arshla's ambiguous (and/or incorrect?) response here: Elements 15 face metadata support? OK, after way too much time troubleshooting, I think I know what's going on. The answer is fairly simple, but not intuitive. Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that what I will call "face tags" are not saved with the "Save metadata to file" command. What makes this extra confusing is that there is no difference in the PSE15 UI between how face tags and people tags display, even though they are handled COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY. People tags are exported/saved, face tags are not. They are essentially useless outside of Adobe. Note that this applies both to faces that were auto-detected as well as manually selected. If it's got coordinates, it ain't coming out of Elements. I understand why this is -- there's no metadata standard for saving face coordinates. However, the obvious solution would be to give users the option to save face tags just the same as people tags are saved. Indeed, the fact that the UI designers essentially made this decision for themselves (by handling these two types of tags identically) tells me that the right hand's not talking to the left in the PSE developers office. So now I have about 1,000 files, many w/ face tags that I want to turn into people tags, but no way of telling which is which. Any ideas? Would Lightroom help here? We don't even care about the coordinates, the face tagging is just a big metadata workflow aid. ... View more

I wrote about this same problem a couple months ago here: Some tags not saving with "Save metadata to file"  No response. I believe that the video I linked to (2017-03-14_1042 ) will show Michel the information he was asking for. In the batch I'm currently working with, I'd say at least half had tags that did not get saved. I have mostly noticed this with people tags. Whether it only happens with tags applied via facial recognition is an interesting question... I'm not sure. I'll do a bit more testing and report back, when I get a chance. Regardless, this is an absolutely, mind-bogglingly egregious bug. Even if it only applies to facial recognition, that feature is the whole reason we're using PSE in the first place. ... View more