Cataloguing in PSE 2025

[gardener179]

Have recently transferred a large PSE Version 6 Catalogue into PSE 2025 and need advice on 2 issues.

1) I don't want to use facial recognition, preferring to do this manually, so have switched it off, but before applying the "reset" button want to be sure that this will only remove people tags applied by facial recognition and won't effect those I imported as manually applied tags.

2) Whilst wanting to continue with using the automatically generated place tags obtained from the picture metedata I would ideally like to separate these more effectively from those I apply in less detail manually. I noticed they come up in separate groups within place tags and tried to move my own applied place tags up into the Keywords section, but the system didn't seem to allow this. is there any other way I can achieve the required separation?

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Greg_S.]

1)   I believe the Reset button will only delete the face recognition data that exists for UnNamed faces.  If you have turned FR off, no new information should be generated and I am 99.999999% confident that it will have no effect on your manually tagged files.  My only doubt exists because I have never used that option in the many years that it has existed.  And I don't know of anyone who has ever used that option.

2)  I'm not exactly clear what you want to do with geo-tagging.  Just like face tagging, there is a difference between the auto-generated System tags and manually adopted Keyword tags.  For many reasons, I don't use the System Places tags and instead use Keyword tags.  AFAIK, you cannot mix and match.  If you give more specific details of what you want to do, I may be able to provide an alternative suggestion.

[gardener179]

Hi Greg,

The issue with geo-tagging is that at present when viewing the Place Tags I see (for example) an "England" category showing all of the place tags that I had manually created in my catalogue prior to importing to PSE 2025, and another "England" category containg all of the smart tags created by geo-tagging. This is confusing, and I'm trying to find a way of transferring my manually produced place tags into Keywords, or in some other way segregating them in a separate section of Place Tags. I thought I might be able to set up a Keyword Category of "Places" and moving my original place tags I created up into this, but PSE 2025 doesn't seem to allow it. I clearly don't want to start all over again, in allocating all of my 60k photos to a  Keyword Place category, and it will also take a long time to consecutively open up all the photos in each of my own created Place Tags, delete the place tag and add a new Keyword Tag (which is my best idea at the moment) . 

[Greg_S.]

I'm sorry, but your response is somewhat ambiguous about which tags you are referring to.  It has been so long since I converted a pre-system tags catalog to a version that contained geo-tags that I don't have a clear picture of what happened when your version 6 catalog was converted to 2025.  At some point there was an interim conversion of manual tags to Places tags.  But there have also been a couple of mapping software changes that have created differences in how the system geo-tags operate.  

Since you already had a manual Keyword Tag system in place, and based on the limited information you have provided, I think my recommendation would be to stick with it.