Copying Files Out of a Catalog

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 12, 2017
1 reply
247 views

My grandfather passed away and left us with a huge library of photos. The problem is they are all tied up in photoshop element 5.0 catalogs which renders them all pretty much useless to the rest of the family as we are not going to all download photoshop to open them or use them or whatever. So my plea is, how do i copy these files out of this catalog so i can just have the jpegs or whatever just the picture file is.

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Peru Bob

Community Expert

The files are not located in Photoshop Elements. The catalogs are just shortcuts that point to the actual files which are located in a location on the hard drive(s).

Do a Windows search for .jpeg, psd or other file formats to find the photos' locations.

If psd files, there are free applications that will open psd files.

D

dinok30844764Author

Participant

when you follow the file path (which is hidden then hidden then hidden some more, elements it appears created a drive? the G drive, which is invisible?) the file path takes me to a photoshop catalog, which is one giant file, as in, when i look at a specific pictures file path, by right clicking on it in elements and getting its information, and follow it, i will eventually end up at one file that is the size of all the photos (like 300GB's) and i cannot open it any further to specific photos, rather when i click on it (the giant file) the catalog, it of course just prompts me to open elements to view the catalog in its entirety

MichelBParis

Legend

dinok30844764 wrote
when you follow the file path (which is hidden then hidden then hidden some more, elements it appears created a drive? the G drive, which is invisible?) the file path takes me to a photoshop catalog, which is one giant file, as in, when i look at a specific pictures file path, by right clicking on it in elements and getting its information, and follow it, i will eventually end up at one file that is the size of all the photos (like 300GB's) and i cannot open it any further to specific photos, rather when i click on it (the giant file) the catalog, it of course just prompts me to open elements to view the catalog in its entirety

The Elements organizer catalog does not contain any photo file or photo file copies. Only a single file named 'catalog.psa'. While the catalog is stored by default in a 'hidden' folder, its size is very small compared with the real library. The catalog in PSE5 is still based on a Microsoft Access database engine, the PSE6 and newer ones are on a Sqlite one, with a much different structure.

- Do you mean you can find a photo files tree both on your disk and on the 'hidden' location you are mentioning?

- Am I right in assuming you still have the computer with a working PSE5 version? If so, you should be able to recover the catalog with all the tags, captions etc.

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