Moving PSE 17 (2019) from Windows to Mac

Report · Nov 25, 2019

I have been using Adobe Photoshop Elements since 2003 (PSE v2.0) and am on the latest 17.0 (2019). Up to now I have done everything on MS Windows and currently on WIn 10 Pro. I have now moved everything to a MacBook Air (v,10,14,2) laptop. My catalog has well over 43,000 items in it, mostly JPG photos and some videos. After making the move and working with the catalog for a while I noticed some disturbing issues.
1. Nearly 3000 of the items took on the date that I restored the backup onto the MAC.
2. About half of them were videos which ended up being all the videos in the catalog.
3. In the JPG photos it appears that these particular photos do not have date information in the “Camera Data (EXIF)” portion of the metadata.
· In the absence of dates in the metadata I would have expected the restore to set the date based on the earliest file date. Or to flag them and ask what I want to do.
· Is there was a utility to update the dates based on what is found in the backup.
· It seems my only option (although very undesirable) is to manually go through all 3000 items and set the date/time. Fortunately, I can still reference the last MS Windows version of the catalog even though it is now very much out of date with the MAC catalog.
4. The other issue I have observed is that when I display the contents of a file directory, using the left-hand Folders panel, there are some directories that have photos in them but say there is nothing to display. In the photo well, the information for these photos show them in the selected directory. FINDER shows that the files are there but selecting the directory in the side panel shows nothing.
· I verified that I did not have any filters active and that all item types were selected to view.
· I tried using the PSE “move” to move an existing file into one of the directories. It was moved according to PSE info and it was in the directory according to FINDER but still not visible when selecting the directory in the left-hand Folders panel.
· Since 15 out of 17 sub folders in one directory do not show files I used right click on the main directory of this group and selected “import media”. It scanned the 1400+ items it found and said they were all already in the catalog. Still they do not show when selecting the directory in the left-hand Folders panel.
· I moved some pictures in to each of the directories (pictures that were not in the catalog) and re-did the “import media”. The new files were found and when I selected the various directories, only the new file show still not any of the existing files in the same directories. The new files and all of the old files all are type “.jpg”.
I have been using Adobe PSE since 2003 and I’m beginning to think that the implementation of PSE on the MAC is not quite up to the standard that I am used to from Adobe.
An observation: I have worked with computers since the early 1970s and if I do a backup and then a restore, the resultant copy will be exactly the same as the original. Adobe does not seem to have taken care that this is the result.

Report · Nov 25, 2019

"An observation: I have worked with computers since the early 1970s and if I do a backup and then a restore, the resultant copy will be exactly the same as the original. Adobe does not seem to have taken care that this is the result."

Do you mean that you are finding that the organizer backup does not restore exactly the same as the original?

That makes me ask the obvious:

Did you move from Win to Mac via the organizer backup and restore?

The organizer process insures that you can restore on any destination while re-creating the media folder trees, either in the original folder structure or in a condensed structure. Keep in mind that if you have to restore the files originally on several drives they will be restored on a single master drive with different original drives translated as subfolders. Only that difference means that the purpose is not to 'clone' your media files library and the catalog. The organizer process does what other backup solution can't do: it updates the links in the catalog. That said, it should not alter the contents of any of your media files, including metadata section.

What you describe would be a possible result of importing the files in the new computer instead of doing the backup and restore process.

I am not surprised that videos and some jpegs (mainly scans or external downloads) don't have the correct 'date_taken'. That happens also on Windows.

Could you give more details about the 'phantom' files not visible in the organizer and 'already in the catalog'? That generally means that the duplicate is already there in another subfolder somewhere. I suppose you can see the supposed 'empty' subfolders by right clicking on the master folder and selecting 'show all files'?

Report · Nov 25, 2019

In answer to your questions:

1. I used only PSE backup/restore to move the files.
2. The original files were on one drive and I restored preserving the file structure.
3. I did not do any importing on the MAC only the PSE restore. When looking at the properties of an item in the PSE Organizer I encounter the following:
* Under General: The items with the improper date have the Restore Date here. All other items have the date that they show in the original Windows catalog. This seems to be the one constant with the files that have the improper date.
* Under Metadata: all of the video files have the metadata dates as the restore date. It seems to be split 50/50, with no regular pattern, with the photo files. Some have the create & modify dates as the restore date while others have the proper dates here. All of them show up in the organizer with the restore date. I assume because the General field has this for all of these photos.
* Under History: all of the items (video and photos) have the modify date as the restore date. All of them do have their import date correctly shown.
4. Under further inspection, the vast majority of the photos with this date problem were no scans. That was an error in my original problem description.
5. As to the 'phantom' files, I was not able to find any examples today. I have been spending the past few days trying to backup the catalog (unsuccessfully) and have been beating up on the catalog.
6. Speaking of backups - PSE keeps telling me I do not have enough disk space. I have cleared up a lot of space, but not equal to the catalog size, and still get the message. This was not an issue on my windows system. I directed PSE's CACHE to an external drive with more than double the catalog in free space. Backup would still not execute.
These problems are not a good sign for me for using the MAC as my base of operations with Adobe.

Report · Nov 25, 2019

"These problems are not a good sign for me for using the MAC as my base of operations with Adobe."

I'll leave other Mac users comment because I am only a Windows users. What I can say about Macs comes from browsing this forum for many years. There are many reported issues with dates on older Mac and PSE versions for instance. There are also a lot of issues with videos metadata, and experts explained that it was a limitation of the video formats; they appear in Windows as well. For jpegs without the original date_taken, I think that it's not a Mac only thing. However, the organizer requires that that field be present for the default indexing order. It may be that the substitution rules are different between Mac and Window (and why not in different PSE versions?)

So, maybe the only questions I can contribute to describe (and hopefully solve some of them) are about the backup process, the 'already present' duplicates not showing, and finally your backup diskspace issue. If we can understand better what is going on, we'll see if it's Mac specific or not.

You have certainly noted that the present forum implementation has serious limitations, in particular the ability to follow discussions with 'nested' subdiscussions. If we can keep each discussion separate from each technical issue, that will make them easier to follow and more useful. That's why I suggest to create a new discussion for the lack of disk space or to follow the discussion on that subject in which you have stated something about the PSE CACHE. I must admit I don't undertand which cache you are referring to.

Report · Nov 25, 2019

Thank you. It didn't occur to me to only put one issue per thread but it sure makes sense. I will go over my issues, re-group, and start a thread for each item that is still outstanding. Again, thanks for all your input.

One last comment. I am on my 4th or 5th windows platform using Adobe PSE and each move was done with a backup/restore within PSE. This is the first time I have had any anomalies that are visible to my working with the catalog.

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Moving PSE 17 (2019) from Windows to Mac