Importing from Elements Organizer looses date information

Question

I have an Elements Organizer catalogue with about 22000 images, many of them being scanned from paper so having unappropiate date information. I edited those date information in Elements Organizer with Ctrl+J and set a date, sometimes only a year, sometimes year and month etc. up to the exact minute.

I also have some files like .avi videos in that catalogue.

When importing this catalogue to Lightroom Classic, only the date information from the EXIF information seems to be used - in cases like above it is not existing or wrong (e. g. when I specify July 1982 it will show up sometimes as 1st of July 1982 which is just not correct or sometimes there is no date at all so it uses the file date). I was at least able to rewrite all metadata to .jpg files to restore all tags that I assigned, and they also show up in Lightroom, but the date information is also very important for me.

Is it somehow possible to workaround this bug and use the exact date information that is also used in Elements?

Another topic, it seems that it imports all images from the version stack of Elements as single images. Can those be imported as one image with a version history?

johnrellis · Answer

When I migrated from PSE to LR 3 in 2010, I had huge problems getting capture dates to import correctly with LR's import command. PSE 8's Organizer was riddled with bugs, including in its date handling, and the LR conversion was also quite buggy.  I ended up using my psedbtool (no longer supported) to write dates from the PSE catalog correctly to .xmp sidecars, and then I wrote a custom Lua script to do the import. It looks like the situation hasn't improved much 14 years later.

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