Elements 12 - I have a corrupt catalog. Cannot be fixed or optimised. If I start a new catalog as suggested, do I import from 2010 onwards - folder by folder? If so (and I hope not - over 100,000 photos),what happens to the Tags on those photos?

Report · May 15, 2017

Elements 12 - I have a corrupt catalog. Cannot be fixed or optimised. If I start a new catalog as suggested, do I import from 2010 - folder by folder? If so (and I hope not - over 100,000 photos),what happens to the Tags on those photos?

Report · May 15, 2017

Hi,

When you say

have a corrupt catalog. Cannot be fixed or optimized

Please mention the reason how this got corrupted and why it can't be repaired.

I would suggest you trying out troubleshooting Troubleshoot catalog issues in Elements Organizer from this link and see if this helps your case.

In case it doesn't, do you have backup of this catalog. If yes then the above link also gives you a away of restoring it from your backup.

Last of all, if none works, then yes the only resort would be to create a new catalog and reimport.

Here you would not to import folder by folder. Just select the parent folder which has all these folders. Get Photos from Subfolder is by default checked. This import all your images in one go. Since the media count is large this might take a while to complete. If the tags were last saved to metadata then they would be there on images which would import on importing the images. If they were not then in that case they won't appear in your new catalog.

Let me know in case you have any queries.

Thanks,

Arshla

Report · May 15, 2017

Arshla

Thanks for your quick reply to my question.

I don't know how the corruption happened.

I did everything as I had done for six years. I imported two days of RAW Photos and was processing them. In the middle of this, the photo I was working on became unreadable. And one by one each of the photos for those two days became unreadable (except the JPEG files which I had already made by processing.

I deleted all of the unreadable photos - about 80 - except 6 which I could not delete.

I already went through the steps which you had linked. And I received a message to the effect that the catalog was corrupted and could not be optimised or repaired.

However, every photo in the catalog up to that point is OK (as I said, about 100,000 of them).

Running the link again which you sent me does not work - just as I had done before.

Hence my question.

No catalog backup. So unless I have something else to try, it looks like I will need to start a new catalog.

I must say that even after all of this time, I hadn't realised that I should have ticked "save metadata". Is that now too late, or is it something that must be done when importing the media?

Regards and thanks

Kev

Report · May 15, 2017

Kev,

I must say that even after all of this time, I hadn't realised that I should have ticked "save metadata". Is that now too late, or is it something that must be done when importing the media?

You don't have to... since you are supposed to do backups, which ensure the tags and info entered in the catalog are saved. But you can 'write metadata to files' for two good reasons when you want: to make the tags available to other softwares (or catalogs...) or as an additional safety measure.

It's perhaps too late, but you could try something which has worked in other hard catalog corruption cases.

- locate your catalog folder, it's a folder containing a file named 'catalog.pse12db'.

- create a new folder under the master folder containing that catalog.

- put a copy of the same 'catalog.pse12db' in that new folder (don't change the name)

- double click on the 'catalog.pse12db' file, that should open the organizer with that minimalist catalog and recreate most of the missing elements, at least the keywords, captions, ratings, stacks and version sets. That may require some time, and maybe a catalog repair as well. That could solve a number of problems of other components than the database itself. Anyway, recreating the thumbnail cache in a background task will require hours.

Good luck!

Report · May 17, 2017

Hello Arshla

Well - created a copy Catalog and double clicked. It took about 33 hours to recreate the Thumbnails. Had to Repair as you thought. That said it was successful, and all of the Keywords are attached. But importing new photos was not successful as the new file is now also stated as corrupted.

Now, I know I can go through the process of opening a new catalog and importing all of the photos together with Keywords. I did a small amount to test it.

Or I can just start a new catalog from today, and have two catalogs (with no new photos in the old catalog). Bit of a nuisance but not impossible.

I have an alternative to recreating an Elements catalog.

Maybe you can comment.

The full Photoshop is not all that expensive to access on a monthly basis in the cloud.

I have a bit of an objection to not owning the Program. But I could learn a lot of new ways (and better) of processing my photos. I always photograph in RAW.

Can you express an opinion for me?

Regards again

Kev