Catalog Open Failure PSE 2022

Hi Sam.  I'm not sure about whether your copy and paste was done correctly.  I see that you have a file called catalog.pse20db.tmp.  Delete that file. 

At this point, I'm going to suggest that you contact Adobe support to help figure it out for you.  You can start a chat session by clicking on the blue Contact Us button under the Help & Support menu at Adobe.com. Or you can contact Support by telephone using the numbers listed here: https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/phone.html. Hours of operation outside of the United States are limited. See the phone link for details.

And before doing anything else, I suggest you do a full backup of your Elements 2022 catalog.  Since it seems to be working, albeit with the annoying messages, there is no harm in backing it up.  Yes, I know it takes a long time with a large catalog.  If you can do so, just leave the computer running overnight, or when you are not otherwise using it.

Next suggestions:

• Create a new catalog and open it.  No need to add any media to the catalog, but see if you run into any problems opening and closing the program again. 
• If there are no problems with the new catalog, go back to the My Catalog 2 1 and see if the problem is resolved. 
• If this catalog still has problems, make a copy of the catalog folder which should be named My Catalog 2 1 and  found in the C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs folder.  You can copy it to the same folder and it will be given a new name by Windows.  In the Organizer, the newly copied catalog should be found in the File Manager dialog.  Select and open it and see if it has the same problem as the original catalog.

I cross-posted with your clarification.  But I will stick with my answer to you.  If that doesn't work, there are other steps to try.

Yes, it would be a good idea to uninstall/reinstall.  When you uninstall, make sure you choose the option to delete all preferences.  If you created a new backup with additional media from your old catalog, you can try giving that a shot first.  (Did you just backup the structure?)

If that doesn't work, restore again from the old catalog and make sure that restoration is complete before doing anything else.   With a large catalog, the last step can take a while and users sometimes terminate the process too early.  So be patient.

@SamPhotoShop said:  Does that mean I will get the error message every time I open PSE? Because so far that is the case. 

Once you have successfully repaired and opened the catalog, you should not be receiving any error message.  Do you have to go through the whole process that you describe in your original post before the catalog will launch or are you just getting the first message which is then ignored if you click the OK button? 

I understand this may be annoying and I have a few thoughts about how to get rid of it, but I shall await your response before giving some suggestions.

Hi Sam.  It is generally true that you cannot save external metadata to a video file.  That is why we have the Organizer which keeps track of important information.  If you want to know more about a video file's metadata, MediaInfo is a free utility that provides a lot of valuable information.

It looks like your catalog is now fine.  When your old catalog was converted to Elements 2022, a copy of your Elements 2020 catalog would have been saved with the old name and a numeric suffix.  You can consider that to be another backup of your catalog and you can always convert it again if you run into trouble again with Elements 2022.

As for backups, Elements 2022 has an additional feature that I don't think was available in Elements 2020.  It allows you to backup just the catalog without backing up the media files.  This makes the process much faster.   And, yes, any tags placed on your video files (including face recognition tags - also new over Elements 2020 I believe) will be saved in the catalog backup.