Portability of Adobe Organizer Tags

[David_F]

I spent a lot of time organizing photos in the Elements Organizer that is part of both Photoshop and Premier Elements.  Now I am concerned whether all my work is transferrable if I need to access my photos outside of Organizer. For example, if Adobe stopped supporting Organizer or if I wanted to move my photos to a different application.  Does any one know if the tags I create (events, people, location) in Organizer can be embedded or attached to  the actual photo files?   Is there a better (i.e., industry standard) app for this type of work that I should be using?  I am making an incredible investment in time and effort by tagging over 25K photos and I'd like to make sure I preserve it. Thanks.

[Greg_S.]

Unfortuantely, there is no industry standard, and each software company deals with tag metadata differently.  At this time, it is possible to move your catalog and its tags to Adobe Lightroom, but even here, there are some differences with how the programs deal with their tags.

It is possible to write your tags into the file's metadata in the Organizer by using the Ctrl+W command.  Most of the metadata is also automatically written to the file if you edit and save a file in the Editor.

System tags (like People, Places, Events) are also going to receive different treatment when transferred to other software.  For example, People tags are all associated with a .json file which keeps the coordinates of the faces in a picture and links them with the name tag that has been applied.  Places uses the geo-tagging coordinates embedded in a file by the camera, but I'm not sure where it stores the geo-location of a place tag that has been added to the map manually. As we have seen, Adobe is also dependent on other service providers to maintain consistency with tagging. The current map service in Elements 2020 has created all kinds of problems for those who used GoogleMaps in prior versions of Elements.  This is one of the reasons I am glad I have continued to use keyword tags for my "places" rather than the system Places tags.

Even Elements itself makes it somewhat difficult to transfer files between different catalogs.  If you were to import all of your Elements tagged files to a new catalog (or send them to a friend who also has Elements), the tags will come into the new catalog as Imported keywod tags, and all system tag information is lost.

FWIW, I have been using the Organizer almost since the first version, and have over 170,000 media files in my catalog.  I would be unable to estimate the amount of time and effort I have put into tagging my files over the years.  Let's just hope that Adobe continues to support Elements.  😊

[David_F]

Thank you so much for the detailed info Greg.  Particularly the CTRL-W.  That makes me feel better.