PSE 2018 Organizer Crashing

[oritl1998]

I hope someone can help. I purchased PSE 2018 so that my organizer would be updated. I am practically not able to use it at all because it keeps crashing. Some things to note:

1. I have all of my photos on EHD #1 (roughly 80,000 photos)

2. I backed up my catalog to EHD #2

3. I really do not understand all this back up/catalog stuff and how it works so keep that in mind if you are able to respond & help me.

Could my problem be related to the fact that I have 2 EHD's and it is taking the program too long to go back and forth? I am able to look through the catalog no problem but as soon as I start to try to do any facial recognition or do searches or even update my backup, all of a sudden PSE Organizer is not responding. It also often cannot find photos and tries to reconnect but it fails. I am beyond frustrated and ready to take my photos to another program but I have put so much time & effort into getting this set up I would hate to have to start all over.

Thanks!

[Greg_S.]

Yes, part of the problem may be that all of your media files are on external drives.  If they are only USB 2.0 drives, they will be particularly slow, particularly with a large catalog such as yours.

It is unclear from your post how you updated to Elements 2018 (or which version you had before).  Assuming that you installed 2018 on the same computer as your previous version, when you first installed it, the program should have recognized your existing catalog and converted it automatically for use by EO 2018.  If this did not happen and you opened a new catalog when you first installed the program, you can still convert the old catalog by going to File>Manage Catalogs and clicking the convert button.  You can then browse to the folder containing the old catalog, select it, and it will be converted.  (The default location for your old catalog is probably C:\Users\[Your Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs.)

If, instead, you backed up your old catalog and attempted to restore it to Elements 2018, that will also work but because of your external file situation and the size of your catalog, it can take many hours (if not more than a day) to restore the catalog.

As for the crashes you are experiencing, we need more details about what you are doing at the time of the crash.  Screen shots of any error messages would also be helpful in figuring out your problems.