Copying Catalogue to different user on another PC

[martins_slack]

Theresa and myself each have a Windows 10 PC containing all our photos.  The photos are in a folder structure by year, month and day.  Eg. a photo taken on 5th January 2021 is in the following folder:-

C:\Users\Martin\Pictures\2021\01\2021_01_05 on my PC

C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures\2021\01\2021_01_05 on Theresa's PC

Up until earlier this year I would save the photos on my PC to a hard drive and retore them onto Theresa's PC with the same folder structure (but under a different user).  I had Photoshop Elements 2019, which I used to categorise, edit and view the photos, but Theresa only had Microsoft Photos, which didn't allow Theresa to see the categorisation of the photos (Keywords etc.) that I had applied in Photoshop.

Earlier this year, after some discussion on this forum, we bought two copies of Elements 2021 and installed one on each computer.  After a few attempts I managed to backup the catalogue and all the photos on my PC and restore them to Theresa's PC in C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures with the same structure of year month and day after that as on my PC.

However, now I've done a new full backup of the catalogue and all the photos on my PC, and tried to restore it to Theresa's PC with:-

New Location C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures

Restore Original Folder Structure ticked

But when this creates a new copy of all the photos in C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures\Users\Martin\Pictures\2021...  It doesn't update the photos that are already in C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures\2021...

Is there a way to update the photos in C:Users\Theresa\Pictures\year\month\day without creating a copy in a Users\Martin folder?

[MichelBParis]

What you want is to merge both catalogs and libraries.

That feature is available in Lightroom Classic but not in Elements. So you'll have to merge them manually.

That implies selecting the smaller catalog, writing metadata to files and importing the files in the bigger catalog.

More details in that old faq by John R Ellis:

https://johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Merging_Catalogs

The import will skip true duplicates but will not restore stacks, version sets or albums. Normal keywords, captions, notes and ratings will be recovered. The new keywords will land in a new 'imported keyword' category. I don't use face recognition, so I'll leave other users to comment on that category.

[Greg_S.]

@MichelBParis said:

The new keywords will land in a new 'imported keyword' category. I don't use face recognition, so I'll leave other users to comment on that category.

Any People tags will also be listed under the Imported Keyword tag category.  However, no face recognition link will transfer and the files will undergo a new face recognition, if desired.  Since the face recognized names have already been tagged and can be found easily without being associated with the actual face, it is fairly easy to create a name tag in the People category matching the person's name tag in the Imported Keyword category.   Filter the keyword tag by that person's name, select all the filtered photos (Ctrl+A) and then tag them with the new (or existing) People tag.  You can then delete the Imported Keyword person name tag.  If you go to the People room and view that person's People stack, there will be a generic icon instead of the recognized face.  For most uses, this is sufficient.

[martins_slack]

Thank-you Michel and Greg for your replies.

In the end what I did was:-

• Delete all the folders in C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures that are I was going to restore from my PC.
• Did a full backup on my PC of the catalogue and photos.
• Restored the catalogue and photos onto Theresa's PC in C:\Users\Theresa\Pictures\Users\Martin\year\month\date.

This wasn't the ideal place for them but at least they are on there and the catalogue works without any great difficulty for me.

Then a couple of days later I refreshed the whole catalogue and the photos to inculde some editing that I'd done plus some new photos, and that seemed to work fine too.