Question

Lost catalog

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
December 3, 2025
3 replies
266 views

I’m hoping someone can help.

I’ve been a Photoshop Elements user for many years and am currently on v2020. I have a huge organizer catalog.
Yesterday, half the Organizer labels stopped working (nothing found when the relevant boxes were ticked), so I decided to restore the Organizer from my backup. But when I tried this, it said that no valid backup was found, although I can see the backup folder contains over 65,000 files (145Gb).
When I went back to my corrupted Organizer, everything, including all images, has now disappeared. Can anyone advise me how to recover?

Greg_S.

Community Expert

Yes, the one dated 12/2/2025 is the most likely candidate - it has the largest size and therefore the most information.

NtandanaweruAuthor

Excellent, many thanks. I've now been able to open my organizer.

I checked that all boxes were ticked under View>Media Types, but still not getting most (but not all) of the People category, and many of the Places category. Even the Events category seems spotty. The selection seems random. I've checked to see if the images are still in my Organiser and they are. Any other suggestions of why I'm only getting some? Is there a date filter or something similar?

NtandanaweruAuthor

... I see my original tags are still attached to the images that the search isn't finding.

Greg_S.

Community Expert

Perform a file explorer search for a file named catalog.pse18db. If you find more than one, what are the names of the containing folders?

Double-click on each one that you find and the catalog should open in the Organizer. If you have turned on the View>Media Type choices you should find your main catalog with all of the photos. (It is fairly easy to unintentionally turn these off by hitting the keyboard shortcut keys which, for photos, is Ctrl+1.)

NtandanaweruAuthor

Thanks for the suggestion. I carried out a search on my C: rive (where the database is stored, and on my external drive where I stored the backups. Nothing by that name in the external drive, but I found 3 by that name on my C: drive. See attached screen capture. All dated Dec 2 or 3, which is when I tried to do a safety backup, before trying to restore my older full backup. Are any of these likely to work, and which one should I try? I'm afraid of doing more damage!Screenshot 2025-12-04 072312.jpgAll

NtandanaweruAuthor

The top file with 'temp' in the name was the safety backup I tried, so I'm guessing that the one dated 12/2/2025 is my best bet?

Greg_S.

Community Expert

We need more information from you.

Do you have more than one active catalog?

Are your catalogs in the default location or have you moved them to a custom folder or drive?

Is your backup a full backup or did you make an incremental backup?

Do you have more than one backup?

Does the backup folder with 65,000 files have a file with the extension .tly?

More, fundamentally, the loss of half the labels (I assume you mean tags) is highly unlikely. What kind of tags were you trying to search for? Did it contain a mixture of keyword tag files and sytem tag files (People/Places/Events)? My guess is that your search criteria did not return the files that you were looking for, not that the tags stopped working (whatever you mean by that). Please explain in more detail what you were trying to do when the problem arose.

Do not be too concerned yet. I believe we will be able to recover your non-working tags. And if you can still open the catalog, go to the View>Media Types sub-menu and make sure that all media types have a checkmark. Click on any that don't.

6422025.12.02.png

NtandanaweruAuthor

Thanks for the quick response.

Do you have more than one active catalog? I had just one active catalog, and two backups.

Are your catalogs in the default location or have you moved them to a custom folder or drive? The active catalog was in the default (I think, as it was set up many years ago). The two backups are on a separate external hard drive.

Is your backup a full backup or did you make an incremental backup? Both backups are full.

Do you have more than one backup? Yes, I have two.

Does the backup folder with 65,000 files have a file with the extension .tly? Searching for .tly in both backup folders doesn't find anything.

More, fundamentally, the loss of half the labels (I assume you mean tags) is highly unlikely. What kind of tags were you trying to search for? Did it contain a mixture of keyword tag files and sytem tag files (People/Places/Events)? My guess is that your search criteria did not return the files that you were looking for, not that the tags stopped working (whatever you mean by that). Please explain in more detail what you were trying to do when the problem arose. I was looking for images of individuals. I tried several individuals in People and made sure that I wasn't searching for two at once. Places seemed to be working.

Do not be too concerned yet. I believe we will be able to recover your non-working tags. And if you can still open the catalog, go to the View>Media Types sub-menu and make sure that all media types have a checkmark. Click on any that don't. When I discovered the problem, I tried to make another backup for safety, but now my current catalog appears empty. It sounds like I may originally have turned off categories in Media>View as you suggest, but no idea how that happened.

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