Downloading From External Hard Drive

@rogera99608056, you must restore the whole catalog, not just a single image. You do this via the File>Restore Catalog menu.  If you don't do this, you will lose all of your tags and album information.  See this article for more detailed information.

In addition to Glenn's advice, I guess one issue you need to consider is how much internal hard drive space you have on your new computer.  If you have sufficient room, particularly if you have a separate data storage internal drive, you should restore your backup to your internal hard drive, and then import the files into a catalog.

It is also unclear whether your backup is one created by Elements or some other backup software.  If the backup was created by Elements, then you should definitely restore the backup rather than simply copy the photo files from the external drive.  If you don't have sufficient room on your new computer's internal drives, then you would need to restore them to an external drive, preferably a second external drive, but it would be possible to restore to the same external drive.  But in the latter case, you would not have a backup of your files in the event the external drive fails.  (That is rare, but it happens.)

For further information please take a look at this discussion I have had with @Jim50.  And Jim, what more information do you need before pulling the trigger?  Whichever way you decide to go is revesible.

Put the images wherever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside. THEN tell Organizer where to look for them.   You don't Load them into elemenets- elements creates a catalogue, along with a thumbnail of the imgae- the pictures don't move when you do this.

Equate the catalogue with and old school library card catalogue.