micheller71255221 a écrit:
I'm sure hoping someone can help. I recently suffered a crash on my Windows 7 PC. Photoshop Elements 8 (yes, I know I'm behind) was installed on that machine. My crashed hard drive is not bootable (Windows corruption issues), but I am able to connect it to my new PC as an external hard drive. Is there any way to recover the years worth of photo tagging and organizing I have done with my photos? Is that stored in a catalog somewhere I can copy to my new machine? My photos have been transferred off of the crashed hard drive on to the new one, and are saved in the same drive path they were in on the crashed machine.
What you have to do is to find the catalog folder. Do an explorer search for a file named catalog.pse8db. You may have to set the explorer to show hidden folders.
The catalog is the folder containing that database file. All your tagging and organization is stored there.
I am not sure that your folder tree structure is exactly the same (Windows has changed the default 'My Pictures' tree to another one since XP), but anyway, your catalog will not recognize your new drive since it uses both the drive letter and the internal serial number of the drive.
The first thing I would do once the catalog is found would be to close the organizer, double click on the catalog.pse8db and see what happens...
The catalog contents are totally valid. The path of your files as recorded in the catalog points to your old drive; it has lost its drive letter, no longer C:, but it has kept the serial number. There is a chance that the catalog will recognize your files on your external drive based on the serial number. If you get all files shown as 'disconnected', you'll have to reconnect from the catalog manager, browsing either to the master folder in your external or internal drive.
Photoshop Elements (PSE) knowledge base.
In researching my problem, I now know that I should have written the tags to the metadata of the photos. Live and learn. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Writing metadata to files is not necessary if you can recover the catalog. It's useful as an additional safety measure or if you want to share the metadata with an external software or simply the explorer.