Backups

[swiftflo3028]

I have recently bought Photoshop Elements.

I have transferred my images from LR into Elements, I have carried out a backup to external HD and the files have backed up as XMI files. I cannot open XMI files from the backup location.

Help please - what have I done wrong.

[MichelBParis]

swiftflo3028  wrote

I have recently bought Photoshop Elements.

I have transferred my images from LR into Elements, I have carried out a backup to external HD and the files have backed up as XMI files. I cannot open XMI files from the backup location.

Help please - what have I done wrong.

Can you explain in more details what you did?

- How did you transfer images from LR into Elements?

- How did you carry out a backup to external HD drive?

- What makes you think that you have backed up files as xml files?

Note that xmp files (not xml) are just small text files storing the edits and metadata of the files and nothing from the pixels of the image.

[swiftflo3028]

Hi,

In answer to your questions.

I carried out an import from LR to Elements.

Copy and paste.

It does say on the icons XMP ( sorry)

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

There has been a recent discussion about exporting from Lightroom to Elements:

Export FROM Lightroom to Elements

I'll try to detail the procedure by describing the differences and similarities between both softwares.

1 - Both are using catalogs to store the information about each of your media files. The information from your camera (date, shutter speed...) as well as your tags, captions or notes are stored in the catalog. The catalogs keeps those informations (metadata) as well as the location (drive, folder) where the image itself is stored.

2 - You could have various catalogs from Elements or Lightroom pointing to the same media files (no duplication of the media files themselves) but what you do in a catalog is ignored by other catalogs, even in the same software.

3 - The catalogs from Lightroom and Elements are different, they are not compatible. Adobe provides a tool to 'convert' an Elements catalog into the Lightroom format, but nothing for converting from Lightroom to Elements.

4 - When people want to recover the above metadata (exif data, tags...) for another software (based or not on catalogs) the general workflow is to 'write metadata to tags'. You can do that either from Lightroom or Elements. Your tags and captions will be recovered, but you'll lose a number of info which can only be stored in catalogs, like albums, collections, stacks, version sets, creations, tags and collections hierarchies...)

5 - In practice, you use the Lightroom commands to 'write metadata to files' to copy the metadata (tags, captions, notes, ratings...) to the files themselves. Then you use the 'Import' function of Elements to populate its catalog from the files themselves. That's about all, and that's not different from a migration from Lightroom to any third-party software.

6 - What is different in the case of Lightroom and Elements is the management of raw files. Lightroom and the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plugin in Photoshop and Elements share the same way to convert raw files and to edit those non-destructively. In short, that means that the editing 'recipe' for the images is stored in the catalog and in the metadata header of the files. When you import the files in Elements, you recover not only the tags and captions, but the editing 'recipe'. If you have saved most of your files in Lightroom with various edits without creating output copies, the editing work is lost for third-party softwares. It's mostly recovered in Elements. That's where xmp files are used. When the editing history in Lightroom has to be written to files, it's not possible to overwrite or update raw files, so small xmp text files are created along the original raw file to store that history.

[swiftflo3028]

Thank you for your explanation, however you have lost me as I do not understand half of what you are saying, so I will mark your answer as correct.

As I have copied my images from LR to Elements I want to drop LR and just use Elements, so I will need a backup from Elements.

[Test Screen Name]

To be very simple: XMP files are NOT images. They are just little files with information ABOUT images. So that's not useful to you unless you also have the image files.