Travel photos on 2nd (small) PC

I do not use the cloud or want to use external storage for all my photos.  I will not keep a copy of the photos on my small PC.

Your situation is a very common one, and there is no mystery about the various ways to deal with working with a desktop and a laptop.

You have decided for some mysterious reasons not to use them. You are in good hands with Greg to get help, but you are forgetting that what you are asking for:

I want all the photos from my small PC to be in my current (and only) catalogue on my main PC.

can't be true is you share something between the laptop and the desktop.

The only catalog in your main PC is not accessible to your laptop. And yes, to avoid any problems like those you have mentioned, you need a single catalog. You have explicitly excluded the easy and foolproof solution to store the catalog together with the library on an external drive. You don't trust using the backup and restore process, which is the safer solution (you need it anyway).

My questions:

-  why no external drive? what's your backup strategy?

- how do you move or copy the data in the laptop to the desktop?

- Are you sure you won't use albums, stacks, version sets and creations in the future?

We may need a little more information to assist you with the best strategy for transferring your travel photos to your main computer. 

But I need to know how to remove incorrect tags already saved to these photos first please, but I do not want to remove the other metadata. (Can removing tags be done in bulk through Elements?)  If this can be done then the following seems the way to go 1. Remove incorrect tags from all photos on small PC.

First, it is not clear why or how you have ended up with incorrect tags for your photos on the travel PC.  Can you give us more detail, including what kind of tags (I.e.  Keyword tags, Smart tags or People, places and events tags) and how many potential images and tags need to be corrected?  Most tags can be removed in bulk through Elements, using different strategies.

We also need to know whether you have saved the tags metadata to the files.  This can happen automatically if you edit and save the file.  Or you can do it manually by using the File>Save metadata to file menu command, or the Ctrl+W shortcut.  (I'm assuming you are on Windows).

2. Save my new, correct tags (metadata) to all photos

See, above.  Select files in the grid and hit Ctrl+W or use the menu command.

3. Move/Copy the files in Explorer, this will allow the same file structure to add them to the main PC (I use date order)

Yes, you will need to move or copy the files in Explorer from one PC to the other.  The file/folder structure doesn't really matter, but it is probably best to have some uniformity in the hierarchy.  I'm assuming that your are not concerned about duplicate files or folders.  However, once you have transferred the files to your main computer and imported them into your main catalog, ALL  further file operations (move, copy, rename) should be undertaken in Elements through the Folder panel otherwise Elements will lose track of the files.

4. Import into elements, and obviously create any new tags at this time.

Here's where we need to understand a little more about your existing and proposed workflow.  If you have  applied keywords and system tags to your files on your travel PC and have saved the tag metadata to your files, when you import the files into the catalog, you will be given the opportunity to automatically apply the imported file tags to a keyword tag in your existing catalog.  Depending on what you mean by "incorrect tags",  you can use this dialog as a way to remove the unwanted tags by unchecking the boxes of the tags you don't want.  Unfortunately, all of the imported tags go into the Imported Keyword Tags category.  You can then click and drag the tags to other categories in your main computer tag hierarchy. For further options, you can click on the Advanced button.

In the Advanced dialog, you can rename the imported tags and/or "map" the tags to an already existing tag in your keyword tag hierarchy.  If you want to use this option, you should create any new tags in the existing catalog before doing the import.  That way, the imported tags will be applied to the correct location rather than the Imported Keyword Tags category.

Am I missing anything here, I get the impression the backup and restore options would not work as it is going into a catalogue that already exists and also they do not have the same folder structure.

I agree that the backup/restore tool would not serve your purpose.

I want all the photos from my small PC to be in my current (and only) catalogue on my main PC. They have been manually tagged and I use facial recognition.

Any facial recognition you have performed on your travel PC will not be carried over to your main catalog.  Face Recognition will be performed again once the files have been imported and so will Smart Tagging, (if you leave auto-analysis on).  However, the People name tags will be imported as keyword tags.  I don't believe you can click and drag these names to the People category or change their category in the edit dialog.  But there is an easy way to transfer the name tags to the People category if you want to keep a clean hierarchy.

A.  Click on the Imported name tag checkbox to select all the imported files with the identified person.  This filters the grid to those photos.

B.  Hit Ctrl+A to select all of those photos in the grid.

C.  If necessary, create a new tag under the People category and tag the selected photos with the People tag.

D.  Delete the imported keyword tag name.

This reply is probably more than you bargained for, and I hope I haven't confused you.  But hopefully it provides you with some strategies to speed up your workflow.  Let us know if your questions have been answered, and give us some more of the requested details if any further explanation is needed.