Photoshop Elements 2022 Organizer Missing thumbnails - Other Folders?

Thanks so much for the quick reply. 

 

If Organizer only sees the duplicated photo/file once, how does it determine which folder to user for creating the thumbnails? 

By @Peter_for_PSE

Hi Peter,

You are coming from a folder based organization and going to a catalog (database) based organization.

Catalog or database users consider absolutely necessary to take advantag of the indexing and grouping features to avoid creating duplicates. Duplicates not only take unnecessary disk space, but they are a nightmare when you have to edit and update files. You don't need to duplicate the files when you can make reference to the same media file in different albums (= files playlists) or by finding them by common tags.

So, in your case, the answer is that when you first scan your computer to reference files in the database, there is an important test to compare each scanned file with the contents of the current catalog. If the scanned file matches the identical criteria (mainly date_taken and file size in kilobytes - not necessarily same file name), it is skipped and only the first one to be read is kept.

You could ask for help and suggestions to avoid creating duplicates after the initial import, or how to create voluntarily strict duplicates in different places, but if your problem is with the first bulk import, the normal 'import' feature will skip duplicates and renaming or moving duplicates elsewhere won't fool the dupes filter at import time and you'll get the dreaded message that files are skipped because they are already in the catalog.