When I exit Organizer, my captions disappear.

[JerryGust]

I recently upgraded to Photoshop Elements 2018. I add captions in Organizer, and as long as I keep those photos in Organizer, the captions are there. However, when I delete the photos from Organizer, the captions disappear. Help !!!

[K-in-NC]

The exact same thing happened to me. Yesterday, I spent hours adding captions to hundreds of photos from a recent trip. Today I wanted to print some contact sheets, and found the captions are all gone -- every single one of them.

WTF, Adobe?

(For the record: I'm using PSE 2018 on a Windows 7 computer. I could add captions without difficulty with PSE 15. What I did yesterday was 1: Select several photos from a bunch I'd imported into Organizer. 2: Right-click and then pick "Add Caption to the Selected Items." 3: Typed the caption I wanted for all the selected photos into the box on the drop-down [whether or not I checked the "Replace Existing Captions" option doesn't matter, I just discovered]. 4: Looking at various photos singly yesterday, the caption appeared under "Information." Then, this morning, my careful work of hours is gone.)

Anybody got any advice? Captions matter a lot to me when I print contact sheets as records and when I create slide shows.

[MichelBParis]

Keywords or captions are only kept in the catalog. You can 'write metadata to files' from the File menu (shortcut Ctrl W).

[K-in-NC]

Thanks for the info.

But this is something that needs to be made more explicit, ideally in the process of creating captions but at least in documentation. (I've never before encountered anything in any software where I have to take a second step to save something I've just typed into a box on the screen.)

[MichelBParis]

K-in-NC  wrote

Thanks for the info.

But this is something that needs to be made more explicit, ideally in the process of creating captions but at least in documentation. (I've never before encountered anything in any software where I have to take a second step to save something I've just typed into a box on the screen.)

The big problem precisely with Elements, is that beginners often think that the concepts in editing, tagging and organizing are (or should be) totally obvious and the softwares user friendly. They are not. To take advantage of the power of Elements, you have to master a number of concepts. They are so numerous that a book would not be enough...

So, you can complain rightly that the job of the software editor is to select what is critical and to warn new users about key concepts and against very common misconceptions. (Well, that's for people caring to read manuals or introductions...)

The concepts for 'digital assets management' are explained in books for professionals like those of Peter Krogh.

For the organizer, you have either the online (F1) manual or the new pdf help file.

https://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/elements-organizer_reference.pdf

You have to get in the middle of the help to find what is the key concept of the organizer (it's the same for Lightroom).

It works based on catalogs.

So, what you are organizing is catalogs, which include concepts like keywords, captions, albums, stacks or version sets.

When you edit something, it's written in the catalog, which provides far, far more power and speed than writing in the files themselves. That's  when this is possible: keywords, captions, ratings... but not for albums, creations or version sets.

The 'second' step' is only a possible option. It's not needed unless you want to share your data with other kinds of browsers or editing softwares.

Like you, I am critical about Adobe not highlighting enough the principles of catalogs in their help resources.