Importing from SD card not fully importing into Elements 11

There are two ways to 'import' media files in the organizer.

- "Import from camera or card reader" when you want to recover files from your camera or from cards, which implies that you want to copy the contents of the cards to your computer AND to register all those files in a catalog (database).

- "Import from files or folders", which  is intended for files already in your computer. Then only the second action (registering the files in the catalog) is performed.

If you choose the second solution for cards, that means that the cards MUST be plugged in to be accessed. If they are not, they are considered as 'offline' drives.

Note that thumbsticks can be used both ways whereas external USB drives are always considered just like internal drives and are NEVER supposed to be copied to your computer.

One big advantage of thumbsticks (with their big capacity) is that if you 'import from camera or card reader', the files will be copied to your computer. If you have set the preferences of the downloader to create a date based folder structure, the files will be imported directly in the correct date subfolder (which will be created automatically if needed). Imagine you have a big batch of pictures from an event on many different days on another computer or external drive. To import them into your catalog directly in the correct date structure without having to create the subfolders, copy the whole batch in the thumbstick and import from 'camera or card reader'.

Edit:

If you want to know more about 'offline' files, use the search box of the 'Welcome' screen and type 'Reconnect offline files'.

That search box is much more powerful than the one of the present forum, and it's really targetted at Elements specific questions.

That's why those who choose to bypass the welcome screen are missing the best help tool in Elements, better than the online help, the pdf manual and the search tool of this forum. Contrary to other automatic and background Elements processes, it does not require noticeable computer resources and is always available with one click. It's not only to give inspiration to beginners. I use it regularly when I have to provide very specific links when answering questions in this forum.

That's because the photos are located on the SD card.  The organizer is just a shortcut to the actual files.

Copy the photos to your internal hard drive or leave the SD card in to work with the photos.