File Management Approach?

[mikem55094165]

Hi all:  I really am struggling with the best way to organize and manage thousands of photos that span about 20 years or so...  As you can imagine, these are scattered throughout many directories/folders on different machines.  I'm trying to consolidate all of them into a large network drive as my PC cannot hold them all.  Given I get a new computer ever so often, I really want to ensure that this network drive (RAID enabled, etc) can hold all my photos.

So what's the problem??   The address on my net drive changed which cause all my pictures to go "OFFLINE"...  The only way to reconnect the catalog appears to be to relink them ONE PICTURE AT A TIME!!  It's driving me nuts...  How can I reconnect my catalog to all these files in one operation?? 

Any help appreciated.  I'm using Premier Elements 2019...  thanks!

[mikem55094165]

On additional detail -  in the diagram below the "Network" PhotoVault folder is just the same as 192.168.1.122...  the problem is I got a new router, so the address is now different and the organizer can't figure it out.  I can relink files one at a time, but that is not practical for the over 8K files I have...

Help!!

[Bill Sprague]

Have you looked at Lightroom Classic?  I use it to keep my image and clip files "organized".  It works.

[mikem55094165]

@Bill Sprague-- nope - I've invested hours and hours into Premier Elements Organizer and hate to start over ...  Particularly given I do find it pretty useful if I can just get it to find/link up my files again...

[NidhiSachdeva]

Moved the Post to Photoshop Elements to get relevant information on Catalogs

[ShelLuser]

I can't really help with the linking problem though the Organizer should be able to fix a lot of that on its own.

Instead I think it's more important to prevent this from ever happening. At the risk of going a litttle offtopic: why are you accessing your drive using its IP address in the first place? That is a recipe for disaster, as you just noticed. Therere are a few things you can do... I'm assuming that you simply plugged in your devices and they got an automated IP address. This would imply that your Internet router is handing those out. If so: check your routers configuration, most so called "DHCP servers" provide an option to assign static IP addresses. So... you might be able to tell your router to give the RAID storage its old IP address back, that would solve your problems.

Another thing I'd strongly suggest: always access remote storages using their name, not their IP address. Check your storage device and see if you can configure a so called "netbios name". That should allow you to access the device using that name. If a storage unit is Windows compatible then it will always provide this option, check your documentation for more info on that.

I obviously cannot elaborate on this because, as mentioned, it's kinda offtopic. But I do think this is your best bet in recovering from all this.

[MichelBParis]

The address on my net drive changed which cause all my pictures to go "OFFLINE"... The only way to reconnect the catalog appears to be to relink them ONE PICTURE AT A TIME!!

Correcting "offline drives" is an old procedure which was used to reconnect CD/DVDs and which is still used for disconnected network drives. I am not competent with those, but the procedure was able to reconnect not only single files but also all files on such a drive.

In the information panel in the right, select a file with the offline mark. In the top 'general' section, find the 'location' line.

Click on 'Location' and you get a dialog with radio buttons to either reconnect Files or Drives.

How does this work in your situation?