Problem with 2025 Organizer loading photo folders from my 2021 Organizer

• @metexaminer  said: i am currently deleting all of the 2025 Organizer photo folders of thumbnails to start with an empty catelog.

It's not clear to me how you are doing that, but please STOP!  Hopefully, if you were using the My Folders panel in the Organizer, you did not check the box to delete the folders from your hard disk:

It appears to me that you do not fully understand how a catalog works.  It does not contain any photo files or folders.  It is only a database that keeps track of, and displays, the files on your computer's hard drive(s), wherever they are stored.  For a fuller explanation please see this post.

• Since you don't want your files in the Cloud, before doing anything else, go to the Organizer's Edit>Preferences>Auto sync dialog and uncheck all of the boxes.  I also suggest that you reboot and then confirm that the boxes remain unchecked.

• What is the name of your currently open catalog?   All of the thumbnails in it (with the yellow questions marks) are missing files.  It's not clear to me how these files, which could only be imported into the catalog using their real folder locations, became missing.  If you moved these files outside of the current catalog, either with a different open catalog, or a different version of Elements, or using WIndows File Explorer, the files will become missing and the catalog in which they exist will lose all track of them.  Do any of these missing files have tags attached to them?  If not, you might as well delete the catalog.  But we can figure that out once you have properly converted your Elements 2021 catalog.

Hopefully, you have not made any actual deletions of files and folders from your hard drive.

Don't worry.  You can still convert your old catalog to Elements 2025.

Go to File>Manage Catalogs and click the Convert button.  Your old catalog should be present in a list in a new dialog.  Select it and click on the Convert and/or OK button.  Let me know if you need more details or run into any problems and I will be more specific with the process.