Some tags not saving with "Save metadata to file"

Report · Mar 14, 2017

I've searched through the archives and found issues that seem similar, but not quite this one.

We're using Photoshop Elements 15 with a catalog shared on a network drive and accessed by three different PCs. With certain photos, not all tags are getting saved to the file when the "Save metadata to file" function is applied. The majority of photos have no problems, but every once in a while a photo will be saved with only a portion of its tags. So far I've only seen it with people tags, but that might only be because the vast majority of our tags are people.

Please view this brief video to see the problem in action: https://www.screencast.com/t/J9meFVOfgJaF

From my browsing of this forum (the only support option for Elements??) I don't have much hope this problem will get fixed any time soon, but I'm sure I don't have to emphasize how bad it is to have random tags dropping off of files. But even getting some idea of what might be causing this would be helpful, so we can watch for it as this project progresses.

Thanks.

Matthew

Report · May 15, 2017

Well, back to the drawing board. My theory below turns out to be incorrect. I just added two tags to a photo: a "face tag" and a people tag. Both were saved to the file. Which is good in a way, but brings me back to the drawing board as far as why some tags aren't getting saved. In my defense, I was misled by Arshla's ambiguous (and/or incorrect?) response here: Elements 15 face metadata support?

OK, after way too much time troubleshooting, I think I know what's going on. The answer is fairly simple, but not intuitive. Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that what I will call "face tags" are not saved with the "Save metadata to file" command. What makes this extra confusing is that there is no difference in the PSE15 UI between how face tags and people tags display, even though they are handled COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY. People tags are exported/saved, face tags are not. They are essentially useless outside of Adobe.

Note that this applies both to faces that were auto-detected as well as manually selected. If it's got coordinates, it ain't coming out of Elements.

I understand why this is -- there's no metadata standard for saving face coordinates. However, the obvious solution would be to give users the option to save face tags just the same as people tags are saved. Indeed, the fact that the UI designers essentially made this decision for themselves (by handling these two types of tags identically) tells me that the right hand's not talking to the left in the PSE developers office.

So now I have about 1,000 files, many w/ face tags that I want to turn into people tags, but no way of telling which is which. Any ideas? Would Lightroom help here? We don't even care about the coordinates, the face tagging is just a big metadata workflow aid.