Organizer: Elements 18 vs. 9

suziewarizona  wrote I am currently using the Elements 11 Editor but I have maintained the Elements 9 Organizer.  I purchase lots of digital scrapbooking supplies online and found that by using the Albums and the Keyword Tags in the Elements 9 Organizer enabled me to find items very quickly in the 3,000 + files I use.  I really didn't care for the Elements 11 Organizer for this purpose but am becoming concerned that between the Windows 10 updates and the fact that Adobe no longer supports Elements 9, I should consider using trying to use the Elements 18 Organizer or find some other image database to use.  I'll probably get E18 for the editor but I don't know enough about how all this works to determine if my current Elements 9 Organizer is in jeopardy.  Does anyone have any thoughts.  If so, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thank you. Suzie

Suzie,

First, your 3,000 files are nothing... a very small library. Mine is about 70,000 items and the organizer can deal easily with more than twice that size.

If you have already compared the organizer in Elements 9 with the 11 version, you'll see that PSE11 introduced a few drastic changes in the interface and tags organization. The following versions have brought more powerful tools in about the same interface.

Version 12 corrected severe bugs/shortcoming from PSE11.

Version 13 and newer ones require a 34-bits hardware, but that additional requirement makes the organizer still more powerful.

Version 15 and 2018 bring new tools, among which a new search engine and the ability to batch process a set images directly from the organizer.

If your hardware meets the requirements, download the 2018 trial version, read the information about what is new and test it for 30 days.

My only warning is that many new features are automatic: face recognition, smart tagging... that requires a lot of computer power and may really slow down your work for features you probably don't really need. Set up your computer to test it without any such automatic features to begin with. Test the new features progressively after that stage... and ask for more help when you discover the new features. You can continue to use versions 9 and 12 with the new 2018. Catalogs from older versions can be converted to the new version.