elements organizer chokes on a few thousand pictures

Report · Feb 04, 2017

I have been trying to index my pictures using Elements Organizer 15. The face recognition feature made me consider using the Organizer for the first time. I let it index all my pictures. After about a week it managed to corrupt the catalog. I started to add one year at a time. After a few years, the most frequent face stacks start to freeze. I click on a stack, nothing is displayed. I click to add a name, nothing happens. I right-click, nothing. I try to drag and drop - nothing.

Another oddity (may be related) is that for some of the frequent faces with a name, I have a suggested picture that stays suggested forever. I accept it, I say "not this person", no effect.

I started to do backups after each year. No success. I got to a point where even a couple of hundred new pictures cause the problems. I restore from backup, try again - the same.

Needless to say, I tried all the repair/reindex/optimize options available. I can't move past that point.

I did not expect to have magic in the low-end Adobe suite. But how did this even get released? It just does not work under real life load.

What can I do? I could probably index everything in small catalogs (i.e. one year)? Kind of sucks, when I have to look for a specific person.

Any workarounds for me to move forward? Or I'm just better off buying a different product?

Report · Feb 11, 2017

Anybody there??? Anybody from Adobe to pretend to care about customers????

Report · Feb 12, 2017

This is a user to user forum,not Adobe.

This is a 'forum', not a chat platform.

You are posting in the week-end when there is very little trafic on the forums.

There is such a thing as time zones. I am discovering your post this Sunday morning.

My short answer in two points.

1- Don't expect me to use the gadget of face recognition feature in the organizer. People identification is much too important for me to use any automatic face recognition feature (genealogy, family history). I have always used 'normal' keywords and categories to manage ONLY the relevant faces in my big library. I can't find anyone in a couple of seconds in a library of 60 000 photos.

2 - The face recognition process needs some heavy indexing (hours, days...) to start with. I am not sure if very big catalogs are a problem with that feature on. Without face recognition, the library size is irrelevant. There are very happy users with catalogs of more than100 000

photos. Splitting catalogs does not help.

Photoshop Elements 6/7/8 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

So, you may be right about face recognition: if you want it, the organizer is probably not the tool you want.

Report · Feb 12, 2017

Thank you for the reply. If you look at the date of the original post, you may see that time zone has nothing to do with it, there is no time zone I know that is one week behind.

I also know that this is a user group. Can you point me to anything better that Adobe offers as support? I spent about an hour looking for that on their web site and all I could ever get to is this. Apparently they have some experts answering questions?

I personally don't find much value in photo organizers, that's why I never used this part of Elements in previous versions. The face recognition feature, though imperfect, can be a big time saver. You're telling me you don't trust it, I'm telling you it does not work.

Any decent face indexing software that you can recommend for me?