working on 2 different installations of elements organizer

"What you tell here about an external drive is what I want. Maybe you can tell me how I can get the catalog on an external drive. My problem is how I get them both on the extternal drive. I would be thankful."

The backup and restore function of the organizer does backup both the catalog and the media files tree.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/elements-organizer/using/backup-restore-catalogs.html

Step by step following the above tutorial:

- prepare two external drives with enough free space to store both your catalog folder and your images, one for the backup, the other for the destination drive. The first stage in the backup program calculates if you have enough space. Follow the backup procedure.

- In the destination drive create a new master folder to receive the restore (don't specify the root folder of the external hard drive). You specify the destination drive and folder in the restore process in 'custom' location. The restored catalog folder will be created just under that master catalog folder.

- Connect the destination restored drive to a computer with the same PSE version, and in the organizer, use the catalog manager to choose 'restore', then navigate to the backup folder in the backup drive (see tutorial) and specify the wanted master folder in the destination drive.

- Once the restore is done, select 'custom' location from your new computer, and browse to the restored catalog folder just under the restored master folder. Find the catalog.pse18db file and double click to open the organizer with the restored catalog. Next time, that custom location will be remembered in the catalog manager.

Note 1:

In Windows, be sure that the external destination drive has the same drive letter in both computers. That's done from Windows.

Note 2:

You can use the catalog manager to move your catalog folder back to the default location on the main computer. You can also copy or move the whole catalog folder elsewhere from the Windows explorer but that's not to share between two computers, that's rather to migrate to a new computer and to get better performance than using an external drive (not critical).

The license terms states that while you may install and activate PSE on two computers max, you should not use them at the same time, it's a one user license. If you have a license for each computer, then the issue is that Elements has never been been thought for network or parallel working. Since you state the backup and restore process, I think that what you are after is to update the second computer from the main one by using a backup and restore process.

I don't think using incremental backup will be realistic for the purpose.

The usual backup and restore process which works regularly implies that you copy the whole state of the media files tree and the catalog folder on the second computer. That will never 'update' the previous state of the catalog on the second computer, only replace it.

That explains why the only current way to work (alternatively) on two computers is to store both the media files library and the catalog on an external drive and to plug in alternatively to the other computer. Nothing special to do, no update or copy.

The backup and restore process is safe (I don't see any advantage in using incremental backups) but very slow, and it implies alternative, not parallel sharing. For instance, that may be worthwile if you backup everything to a laptop for a given period, and want to recover the edits and new files on your main desktop.