Elements 11 [How to clean out all links and folders from Organizer and restart as a clean program from the beginning?]

rbohn61  wrote It is a long back story, but I need to know how to clean out all links and folders from Organizer and restart as a clean program from the beginning. This version was purchased online, and downloaded some time ago and was, unknown to me, collecting all sorts of links to folders on my Mac  that had modified and moved several times. What are my options? A fix or uninstall and buy new version? Thanks

The first thing to do is to save the tags and captions information in your present catalog to the photo files themselves, shortcut Ctrl W (write metadata to files) with all your files selected (Ctrl A).

Start with a new catalog. From the catalog manager, click on the 'New' button.

Have a look at the 'File' menu and the option to 'watch folders'. Disable it and delete existing paths in the list.

In the Edit >> Preference menu, select the location for the Files option to indicate where you want to save files, in the 'Camera or card' option do the same.

Now, you are ready to re-import your files (that is to register, index them in the new catalog). Import only from the folders you have chosen yourself. The files in those folders and their subfolders will be 'imported', that is indexed in the catalog. The tags and captions already copied in the metadata header of your photo files will be recovered in the new catalog.

Note that if you have 'duplicates' according to the criteria in the organizer (same date_taken and size in kilobytes), the import process will skip duplicates and notify you after the import.

You can delete the old catalog from the catalog manager after the new import.

Remember that to keep a cleen catalog without 'missing / disconnected' files, you must not delete, rename or move files or folders outside of the organizer. Use the Folders panel on the left for such actions.