Sharing Organizer Data

[mypublic1]

I'm starting to scan our many albums of print photos so that each of my children can have a copy of all of their childhood photos. I started using Photoshop Elements to organize and label them ( to make it easy for them to search for photos by event, theme, people in the photo, etc.), but I think I've come to a realization. The program does not add information to the photos. So it seems that the only way all of that organizing would be of benefit to my children would be if they were viewing the pics on my computer. Is that correct? If so, that does not meet my needs. Is there any way that I can share my tags, etc. with them? For example, can I send them copies of the photos on an external drive with a file that would contain all of the data I had tagged on to them? Could they then install PSE on their machines and import the photos and data into their copies of organizer and thus enjoy the fruits of my labor? If so, I would appreciate any details on exactly what I need to do to complete this process. Thanks in advance.

David

[MichelBParis]

mypublic1  wrote

I'm starting to scan our many albums of print photos so that each of my children can have a copy of all of their childhood photos. I started using Photoshop Elements to organize and label them ( to make it easy for them to search for photos by event, theme, people in the photo, etc.), but I think I've come to a realization. The program does not add information to the photos. So it seems that the only way all of that organizing would be of benefit to my children would be if they were viewing the pics on my computer. Is that correct? If so, that does not meet my needs. Is there any way that I can share my tags, etc. with them? For example, can I send them copies of the photos on an external drive with a file that would contain all of the data I had tagged on to them? Could they then install PSE on their machines and import the photos and data into their copies of organizer and thus enjoy the fruits of my labor? If so, I would appreciate any details on exactly what I need to do to complete this process. Thanks in advance.

David

David,

The tags, captions and ratings you assign to your photos are written in the catalog, but you also have the choice to use the menu File >> Write metadata to files to make those available to other browsing softwares, including Windows Explorer or Mac Finder.

However, if you want other people to take advantage of all of the power of the Organizer with the same ease of browsing and searches, those people should have the same organizer version and the same catalog.

A common solution to share a catalog with the photo folders library is to store both on an external drive. You only have to plug-in the external drive, and everything is ready. To share a single external drive like this with more than two computers is not really practical. Each user could create a backup and restore from the external drive to his own computer. That takes time (night job?) but if the users are happy to update not too frequently, that can work.

[mypublic1]

Michel:

Thanks for your reply. Your "common solution" sounds like what I would want to do - an external hard drive for each child. I'm new to Organizer so am not yet proficient. How would I go about transferring the catalog to the hard drive? And will that automatically include all of the tags, keywords, etc. or does that information reside in a separate file that I will also need to copy onto the driive?

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

mypublic1  wrote

Michel:

Thanks for your reply. Your "common solution" sounds like what I would want to do - an external hard drive for each child. I'm new to Organizer so am not yet proficient. How would I go about transferring the catalog to the hard drive? And will that automatically include all of the tags, keywords, etc. or does that information reside in a separate file that I will also need to copy onto the driive?

The process to do three actions at the main time:

1 - moving the catalog (the folder containing the database)

2 - moving the image folder tree(s)

3 - updating the catalog for the destination drive + folder

... is to use the two steps backup and restore using an external drive to store the backup folder:

Move Elements Organizer catalog

In your case, ideally you use an external drive to create the backup folder (not a simple copy, it's only for the use of the restore process), you do the restore from that backup disk to the destination external drive. All your image files are restored in the same folder structure as the original and your catalog folder is also restored and updated to link to the new destination of the files.

(It's not recommended to use the same external drive - slow - requires enough disk space).

The same process can be used to migrate the contents of the common external drive to any other computer.

Let' say you have several  users to update.

You do a backup to external drive 1

You restore the backup to external drive 2.

(you can use either your computer data or the external drive, they hold the same info).

You transfer external drive to user 1

User 1 can use the external drive 1 immediately.

He can do the migration from external drive 1 to his own computer.

Then he transfers external drive 1 to user 2

... and so on.

And the process insures that anything in your catalog, tags, version sets, notes etc. are exactly similar everywhere.

Sending a small external drive by mail is easy. You may only need to have a single one passed to your users one after the other.

[mypublic1]

Thank you so much!

[mypublic1]

Another follow-up question. So I create a catalog for each child, and give each child an external hard drive which contains his specific catalog. On my computer I now have 3 catalogs: the default catalog, a catalog for son 1 and a catalog for son 2. Can I combine these three catalogs into the default catalog without losing all of the tags, keywords, etc?

[MichelBParis]

mypublic1  wrote

Another follow-up question. So I create a catalog for each child, and give each child an external hard drive which contains his specific catalog. On my computer I now have 3 catalogs: the default catalog, a catalog for son 1 and a catalog for son 2. Can I combine these three catalogs into the default catalog without losing all of the tags, keywords, etc?

Bad news: forget about merging different catalogs in the Organizer. That would be possible with Lightroom, it's very difficult and time consuming for the organizer:

Photoshop Elements 6/7/8 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

That's why the general advice is to use a single catalog and to differentiate the files by assigning specific tags for each target user.

Let's assume you are managing all the final catalogs from a single catalog with such individual tags. An idea would be to duplicate the source catalog folders into 3 sub-catalogs, and in each one, to delete all the files other than the user tag. Then backing up... The problem is that the organizer is very bad at deleting huge amounts of files at the same time; chances are it will only accept deleting many smaller batches at a time.

Another very different sharing solution would be to let each child start with his own catalog, and to provide periodically a set of edited files specifically for each child. You can 'export' as new files the latest 'import batches' with only the correctly tagged items. If you have written metadata to files, your child will import those files keeping the tags, captions and notes. You simply have to 'write metadata to files' and export the selected batch to any shareable media like a USB stick or SD card (even sharing via Dropbox or similar).

If you are interested in that other solution, we could find the best workflow in more details.