missing all people tags..! PSE 2018 upgrade from PSE 15 Help

[ronanxyz]

I did not notice for a while that all my people tags were gone when I moved to PSE 2018 from PSE 15...! HELP PLEASE....with 50,000+ photos I am in a panic. All my other tags are present, but all people tags are gone...! I am not a PSE expert by any means. I still have my PSE 15 on my pc and I went to open it and I had to reload my serial #, editor opened but when I went to open Organizer it gives me a message that says: Default catalog could not be found please open or create a different catalog.!! I never changed a thing with PSE 15 when I upgraded, I just started using my PSE 2018, I thought everything was there.

There has to be some way to get my people tags tree back I just don't know how. I have been using PSE 2018 for a 5 or 6 months loading photos into the organizer and tagging them. Not until I went on a name tag search did I resize all my previous tags were gone. Does anybody know how I can recover them..?

I even have my previous PSE 2013 on my pc but I have not opened it in forever.

I have used PSE since 2008 or so and this never happened.

thanks for any help

[Steve Grisetti]

Why did you have to reload your serial number into the program to open Photoshop Elements 15? You say you still have it on your PC. There is no reason it shouldn't still function with its existing catalog, even if you also installed Elements 2018.

If you open Elements Organizer 15 and go to the File menu and select Manage Catalogs, what is listed as your current catalog in the Catalog Manager?

[ronanxyz]

My catalog 11 Elements 15 Organizer (current)

I finally did get my PSE 15 to open, all my people tags are intact there! How do I get them to PSE 2018..?

When I go to file, then manage catalogs the Convert catalog box in PSE 2018 just shows:

My catalog, Elements 14 Organizer, 0 media items and with the date I moved from 14 to 15.

After Clicking box, show previously converted catalogs, Then my PSE 15 catalog shows up, called: My catalog 11 Elements 15 Organizer, 42000 media items. When it first appeared it showed last modified date as the date I upgraded to PSE 2018, 3/2018. after closing the window and opening it again later(a few minutes later) it had changed to the current date under last modified..?

My question does this PSE 15 catalog have my people tags intact on it? I did not do my full backup of PSE 2018 until a few weeks ago onto an external hard drive. At that time, I disabled Face Analysis tags I also hit Reset Face Analysis as I assumed this would remove ONLY the Face Analysis tag results…wrong! It deletes all manual people tags also I learned!

What happens if I click on convert my Catalog 11 again in PSE 2018…? Does it take me back to where I was when I upgraded 4 months ago? Do I lose what I have done since then? I am very paranoid here now since loosing all my people tags!

should I backup my PSE 15 catalog first?

Guidance much needed

Thanks

[Steve Grisetti]

For the record, it's the Elements Organizer, not Photoshop Elements, that creates and manages your media catalogs.

That said, if you open up the Catalog Manager in the version 15 Organizer, you should be able to select your old catalog and then select the option to update it. This will not overwrite the old catalog. This will just update it for version 15. During the conversation, you'll likely be asked if you want to import the old metadata. Say yes.

[ronanxyz]

Thanks

If I converted again this updated PSE 15 catalog from the Catalog manager in version 18 Organizer wouldn't I end up having duplicates of all my photos?

I don't know what to do...short of uninstalling PSE 2018 and starting fresh with a clean install and my previous PSE 15 catalog once again.

[Steve Grisetti]

I'm sorry. I don't know what to recommend other than what I have.

[D-R-M]

This may be too late, but could help someone else. I have just found a similar problem, having now moved to PSE20 from PSE14. However, I have discovered that the PEOPLE tags are in the meta data for the unedited file, BUT NOT IN THE EDITED VERSION! Thus, if you expand the versions set you can find the tags in the un-edited file. 

I suspect that for some version of PSE (I have used perhaps 4 different versions) when I added the tags, some were not applied to all versions of the picture. If I experiment with PSE20, if I add a tag to the edited file it seems to not to be added to the original.

I suspect that different versions of PSE behaved in different ways and this is an infernal mess. I have long wished that instead of adding extra stuff which isn't useful, Adobe would simply fix the bugs in what they have (but this doesn't make them any money).

I suspect that all one can do is to expans all images and check one-by-one that the tags match and fix those that don't (I have 24'000 images).

[D-R-M]

It is actually wosre than I had thought. I have found pictures with edits from previous versions of PSE in which I has exported the metadata to the files and I have found the tags in these files. However, PSE20 does not show the PEOPLE tags (in either original or edited files), although it does show other tags. Thus, at some point the conversion from one version of PSE to another lost the PEOPLE tags from the data

base. They were obviously inserted originally, as I had successfully exported them to the metadata in the files.

Thus, a bug introduced by Adobe, and not picked up by any sort of quality testing, will require an enormous amount of work to fix as I will have to go throough the files one by one. However, I am now very reticent to make any further use of an Adobe product. I have already found a much better editor, and the Organizer is broken and unreliable. In principle I could import the tags from the files, but the Organizer does not seem to have a facility to do this.

A complete disaster.