Preserving Tags when updating to PSE 18

Hmmm, out of many difficulties I have had with PSE 2018 this was not one of them  However  in my case I had imported tags from AcDsee and Picasa folders. Picasa was writing tags into the IPTC area of the JPG's and I had AcDsee save the metadata from its catalog into the file ( a lengthy and a manual process) Even the people tags came over.

Since that seemed to work so well I would suggest that if no other cure is found, that you manually write the tag data into the file using PSE 12, then PSE2018 should have a redundant (catalog and metadata) way of associating the tags with the photos.

Good luck!. By the way I am now using the 200+ generated smart tags to make my own permanent tags. I am amazed that smart tags could not only for instance recognize "dogs" but also "golden retriever" as a breed in two separate categories. Its even pretty good at accuracy, so what it selects as say "construction" category is indeed ~75% construction related. If nothing else works start with the smart tags and rename them as needed. It even recognizes what country the photos were taken.

pauls5080030  wrote I have just updated from PS Elements 12 to PS Elements 18 and have converted my 58,000 photo catalogue into Organizer successfully ...

Step by step, please...

So, if you have converted your catalog, what I understand is:

- you installed PSE 2018 in the same computer with PSE12.

- at the end of the installation, you have been prompted to 'convert' your previous (current) PSE12 catalog

- you have agreed to the conversion which ran successfully (= without error message)

successfully except none of my pictures have retained their tags.

Successfully probably means that you are finding all your pictures in the new 2018 catalog. 'None' suggests that you can't see any tag associated with any pictures in the bottom of the tags panel on the right, nor in the bottom bar when you have zoomed in the browsing space to see a single file.

It has imported Keyword Tags okay

Which means the display of tags in the right panel is complete.

if I click on one of the tags I get a very small selection of the pictures associated with that Tag but not all of them.

So, that's different from what you wrote above: 'none of my pictures have retained their tags'.

Are you speaking of Face Recognition tags or normal keywords?