How to migrate image sources to new drive?

dennyb61600447 wrote: I am currently on Version 8.0 of Photoshop Elements on a PC machine running Windows 7. The target source for all my pictures is on an external hard drive that is failing. (I do have sporatic access.) I do have backups of all my images (and my catalog) on other external drives, but I have not been able to modify the catalog to access these pics because the catalog is out of sync with the new drive letter and path. Is it necessary to completely rebuild my catalog from scratch by importing several thousand images? Even if I did this, would I lose all of my tags? I have tried to physically modify the new external drive letter & path to match the old drive....without success! Is there a better way to handle this?

I understand that the backups you are mentioning are not made from the organizer. If that were the case, you would have no problem to restore all your catalog and pictures to any new drive.

What you should do now anyway while the present source drive is still working is to select all pictures of your catalog and use the menu File >> Write metadata to file command. In the event that you had to reimport all your files, you'd recover your tags and captions.

What about the location of your catalog? Is it on the main internal drive (by default) or is it moved to the source drive?

Of course, if you can use the organizer to create a full backup, you would lose nothing.