Resurrecting multiple catalogs?

[The Old Fart]

After multiply commuter crashes & having had to send HDD for data recovery I have a quite a few different cataloges.

I'm hoping to somehow to merge them all into one.  Luckily now all photos are on a new  external HDD.  All old photos had a file name tags on them, some/many will be duplicated, most will have EXIF data when,where camera etc.  Would this be lost?

If possible how do I do this?  Create a new drive my perhaps searching entire drive for JPG's?  Point program to seperate folders of previous catalogs.?  Any other ideas are welcome.

I'm using PSE 11 is this version up to doing this job?  Is there any better way to achieve whats needed?

[The Old Fart]

Does nobody have any ideas or answer?

[Greg_S.]

Multiple catalogs cannot be easily combined.  But before I can suggest a strategy for you moving forward, we need to know more about what happened, and what you currently have available.

Why do you have several different catalogs?  Did you create all of them, or is this the result of the data recovery of your hard drive?

How are the photos structured on your new hard drive?  Do they follow the old structure or are they simply jpgs placed in to folders with the original folder name?

Are you able to open any of the catalogs?

Has it been your practice to write the metadata to the files?

[The Old Fart]

I have different catalogues because I have had many major PC problems.  I also had a drive from data recovery.
I had a HDD fail & was sent for data recovery. It came back on a brand new 4TB HDD that had many thousand JPEGs on it but not all.  The pictures were on it but not the catalogue.

I thought that it was best to put all other photo's catalogues, backups, that I found elsewhere on the PC onto this same drive new HDD.

As for structure I used to have a tree then would have things, like countries,cities, people,events etc.  A few months back I noticed that my events tags were gone but the rest were still working. I don't care if I have them in individual folders or just one with everything in it.

Almost all pictures used to display the file name in the Organizer under the thumbnail.  All pictures taken for the past 20 odd years  should have GPS & DCIM data embedded.  Any change I asked to be written onto the file & saved. 

I only moved pictures with the Move feature.

There are still probably problems that were created by Windows.
A friend showed me that his PC is displaying that his latest pictures were dated as taken next month even though the camera had the correct date set on it.

I do have a catalog that opens but about 98% of thumnails can't be found,

[The Old Fart]

No ideas Anyone?