Importing Image Tags from Bridge into Organizer

"I use both Organizer 15 and Bridge to manage my photos. (Organizer mostly for it's facial recognition function, Bridge for everything else.)"

That explains all. People wonder why it is recommended everywhere never to use two different organizing tools (or even two different catalogs) at the same time. What you are seeing is exactly the illustration of the fact that what you do in a tool is ignored by the other.

Another common recommentation is that you can do the contrary of your choice: using the organizer or Lightroom to do all but some operations for which Bridge is more advanced.

Now, the precise issue you are having and what you can do about it.

Since the secondary organizing tool (organizer or Lightroom) does not know what Bridge has changed, you need a process to update the catalog with data which has been changed from Bridge or the Explorer or whatever external tool. Lightroom has a utility to sync the data in the catalog with the current state of the metadata in the media file. You can create presets to define exactly what should be updated or not.

Elements has no such advanced utility, so you have only the following partial workarounds.

- Since the catalogs are only updated with the metadata at import time, you can remove from catalog and reimport. Bad solution especially in your case (you are using face recognition).

- Not widely known, you can update some metadata by using the command to 'Update thumbnail'. That updates the captions among others, but not tags.

- For tags, the management of the IPTC panel lets you update the tags in a batch of files from the data in the catalog.

First you select a batch of images.

In the advanced mode of the information panel you remove all tags (you replace all tags with a , for instance), then from the organizer you write metadata to files (Ctrl D) (Ctrl W)*. That works well if the organizer is your main tool and Bridge the second one.

I don't use face recognition and I use standard keywords for people in custom categories. Those are common to the organizer and Bridge and I have no problem to manage everything in the organizer while making the changes available to Bridge or any other tool like the explorer. I might use Bridge for some feature like IPTC management, but for searches with multiple criteria in a big catalog, it's night and day. Just try to select images based on a substring of a caption in a catalog of 180 000 items; or if you need to apply a temporary keyword to most of those items and remove it after your process, just compare the speed.

* Thanks Greg for correcting the typo...