I'm primarily a Photoshop (Beta) and ACR user but for many years I've used the Photoshop Elements Organizer to catalog my large image collection. For the last 3 years I've used the Organizer 2022 version. It has mostly worked well, suits my needs and has a nice, compact screen layout. Its UI is intuitive. Once in a while it has some quirks that screw up a few entiries in the catalog, which take a trial and error approach to resolve, but so far I've had success restoring items. I thought that if I upgraded to PSE 2025 maybe those problems would go away and that maybe performance would improve a little.
Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong, unless I've totally missed something that should be obvious. The UI has taken a step backwards, maybe a decade or more. The use of display real estate is terrible. What used to be nice, compact displays of the folder lists and tags now uses twice as much space per entry as they did in the 2022 version. The thumbnail displays look clumbsy. Since my collection of image is large (a bit over 90K) this UI forces me to do a lot more scrolling than I had to do in the 2022 version.
Another thing that bugs me is that it appears PSE 2025 wants to automatically sync my catalog to the Adobe Cloud. I'm not sure that I want to do that since my catalog is rather large. I would prefer to back up the catalog to another drive on my system. I did not see any place in the Preferences to suppress this. The Auto Sync portion of Preferences seems to be focussed on syncing media, which is also something that I don't need to do. My media storage is around 4 TB now.
Fortunately I have not taken an unrecoverable path. Unless I discover how to get back to what I enjoyed with the 2022 version I guess I'll just chalk this up to a bad purchase and remove the installation. I doubt that I'll get an offer from Adobe to have my purchase refunded. All of this suggest that I should start seriously looking for another way to catalog my images. Maybe this will force me to use Lightroom, another program I don't like. Boohoo. A good product ruined just to be able to say that new features and improvements have been added.
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