PSE existing keywords management at import time.

[alainm44]

Hello

When you use CTRL W , all your "keywords" are written in the file metadata. This also true for the "Persons" tags, the "Events" tags and any  photo description .

If you  “reimport”  the photos you can select the option to match the metadata keywords with the existing ones in PSE. This works fine but NOT for the persons tags. Rather than matching them with their PSE equivalent, a new category is created (“imported tags”) and all the persons tags are written there. I suppose that all the tags that PSE cannot match are grouped in this category, but I do not understand why the matching is not extended to the "persons" category . It is also the case for the “events” tags.

In PSE, the category “Persons” et “Events” are not  part of the “Keywords”  category, but when they are written in the metadata their tags become “ordinary” keywords… This is certainly the explanation, but  could not it be taken care of at reimport time ?

Unless I missed something in the options available ? 

Thanks for your comments

Alain 

[Greg_S.]

You are absolutely correct.  Elements treats People/Places/Events tags differently than keyword tags.  (I call them Elements system tags, but they don't have an official name AFAIK).  I believe the reason for the differentiation is that People tags are associated with the face recognition data, and Places tags are associated with geotags in the metadata.  (I don't have an explanation for Events except they may be associated with another algorithm for creating them, partly based on file/folder names such as Birthday or Christmas etc.)

I believe you have already figured out that you cannot click and drag a "People" tag from the the Imported Keyword Tags Category to the People hierarchy.  Again, this is because of the association with face recognition within the database file.  If you have an imported keyword name in a file's metadata, you could simply click and drag the file to a new person name created manually in the People hierarchy of the tags panel.  However doing this will generate a generic icon instead of a recognized face in the Named People room of the Organizer.  If that doesn't bother you, you can do the following:

• Select the person's Imported Keyword tag in the Keyword panel. (This will display all of the files of that person.)
• Create a new People tag with that person's name, using the dropdown menu that is available next to the People category:

• Press Ctrl+A to select all of the keyword-filtered files for that person.
• Drag the newly created People tag to one of the selected thumbnails (or vice versa).
• When I do this, I also delete the Imported keyword tag for that person, because it can create confusion when searching.

I believe that when you accept the option to import keyword tags at the time that the file is imported into a new catalog, the Imported Keyword Tag category will contain keyword tags that have been created in other Elements catalogs, even though the metadata has not been written to the file with Ctrl+W.

I totally agree with you that there should be an option to treat People tags as keyword tags (and vice versa), with the understanding that there are some limitations to doing this, as noted above.

[alainm44]

Thanks Greg for your quick response.

Until such feature is available (if ever) I will stop using "reimport" .

Actually, the reason I got into this,  was my attempt to solve the following problem :  For my "scanned" photos (paperphotos  and diapositives) the creation date is irrelevent and I thought I could replace all these misleading dates by a commun one,  say 01/01/1900 , using Bridge in "batch mode". That works fine for the photos metadata, but it does  not change the photo creation date in PSE (which has  been written in the catalog during the first import). So to get the new dates in PSE I tried to delete and reimport the photos , and then was confronted with the reimport issue of the people tags ...  I fully agree that changing the creation date  should have been done BEFORE initial import. My mistake, but this leaves me with no practical solution for about 9000 thousand photos already imported.

Thanks.

Alain 

[Greg_S.]

If you are trying to date scanned photos, why are you not simply adjusting the display date in the Organizer?  You can change the date of multiple photos with a single adjustment.

[alainm44]

Hi Greg

I guess the answer is that I am not enough familiar with Organizer and I am probably looking for complication altough the solution is just there. 

This function is indeed the SOLUTION  for PSE. Thanks a lot. 

Of course since the file metadata must respect a true date format , the "generic" dates created by Organizer  are not written in the file using "ctrl W".   I will continue (using Bridge) to put my own value and erase the  "non significant" ones