Preserving Tags when updating to PSE 18

Report · Jan 21, 2018

I have just updated from PS Elements 12 to PS Elements 18 and have converted my 58,000 photo catalogue into Organizer successfully except none of my pictures have retained their tags. Obviously, this is a huge blow to me and I have searched on this forum but cant's see the answers as to how to do it. It has imported Keyword Tags okay and if I click on one of the tags I get a very small selection of the pictures associated with that Tag but not all of them. Please help!

Report · Jan 21, 2018

pauls5080030 wrote
I have just updated from PS Elements 12 to PS Elements 18 and have converted my 58,000 photo catalogue into Organizer successfully ...

Step by step, please...

So, if you have converted your catalog, what I understand is:

- you installed PSE 2018 in the same computer with PSE12.

- at the end of the installation, you have been prompted to 'convert' your previous (current) PSE12 catalog

- you have agreed to the conversion which ran successfully (= without error message)

successfully except none of my pictures have retained their tags.

Successfully probably means that you are finding all your pictures in the new 2018 catalog. 'None' suggests that you can't see any tag associated with any pictures in the bottom of the tags panel on the right, nor in the bottom bar when you have zoomed in the browsing space to see a single file.

It has imported Keyword Tags okay

Which means the display of tags in the right panel is complete.

if I click on one of the tags I get a very small selection of the pictures associated with that Tag but not all of them.

So, that's different from what you wrote above: 'none of my pictures have retained their tags'.

Are you speaking of Face Recognition tags or normal keywords?

Report · Jan 22, 2018

Many thanks for your reply. Yes, its the same PC for both PSE12 & 18. On installing PSE 18 I was prompted to convert my catalogues which I did without errors. And it seems I can view all my photos in PSE18 which is excellent.

But in PSE 12, there are two sections of Tags; Keyword Tags (which I didn't use) and People, Place & Events Tags which I used extensively.

In PSE18, none of those PSE12 PPE tags appear in the PPE section of PSE18; some of them (but not all and not many ) now appear as Keyword Tags. And if I click on one of the small checkboxes to the left of a Keyword Tag, it selects only a couple of pictures that had that Tag but not all of them. I hope this helps define the issue better.

Report · Jan 22, 2018

But in PSE 12, there are two sections of Tags; Keyword Tags (which I didn't use) and People, Place & Events Tags which I used extensively.

Ok...

I only use only the Keyword Tags and totally ignore the People, Place and Events ones which I can handle much better in the Keyword tags... Sorry, I can't help you there.

Report · Jan 22, 2018

Hmmm, out of many difficulties I have had with PSE 2018 this was not one of them However in my case I had imported tags from AcDsee and Picasa folders. Picasa was writing tags into the IPTC area of the JPG's and I had AcDsee save the metadata from its catalog into the file ( a lengthy and a manual process) Even the people tags came over.

Since that seemed to work so well I would suggest that if no other cure is found, that you manually write the tag data into the file using PSE 12, then PSE2018 should have a redundant (catalog and metadata) way of associating the tags with the photos.

Good luck!. By the way I am now using the 200+ generated smart tags to make my own permanent tags. I am amazed that smart tags could not only for instance recognize "dogs" but also "golden retriever" as a breed in two separate categories. Its even pretty good at accuracy, so what it selects as say "construction" category is indeed ~75% construction related. If nothing else works start with the smart tags and rename them as needed. It even recognizes what country the photos were taken.

Report · Jan 28, 2018

Thanks to everyone for your replies. Needless to say I am extremely disappointed that PSE 18 has not preserved my People, Place & Events Tags. Until I figure out a way to do so, I will stick to PSE12 for now but think about migrating my 58k PPE photo tags over time to Tags.