How to divide the catalogue into several catalouges in Photoshop Elements

[Disefan76]

Hello.
I have some problems with my Adobe Photoshop Elements 18. I have hade a lot of pictures into a single catalogue.  There are over 30 000 pictures in my single catalogue. This is awfully slow to work with. Element works really slow with so many pictures.
I have been trying to divide it into several catalogues. Use one for pictures from each 10 years. This will reduce the number of pictures for each catalogue.
But when I create a new catalogue, I can’t copy pictures and their Element-information into the new catalogue.
How should I do in order to move pictures with their information into a new catalogue?
I don’t want to ad the pictures and rewrite all their information again. They are so many.

Thanks for any help

[MichelBParis]

30 000 files is a small catalog and can't be the reason for the slowness you are facing.

On the other hand, generally, dividing a catalog practically never gives you any significant speed advantage apart from backups. 

Elements does not provide a way to split a catalog or 'export' a subcatalog. The workaround would be to make a copy of the the catalog folder and to delete files in the original catalog while keeping only those files in the catalog copy. However that won't work for another limitation in Elements: it's extremely slow to delete thousands of files at the same time and the process will abort with too big batches.

So, the two key questions about speed are:

1 - Do you use face recognition and automated processes?

2 - Is your hardware ok, especially the RAM amount?