Question: How to save Adobe PS Elements metadata?

wheat — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 08:40:46 -0800

My wife's (Windows XP) laptop took a dive. Our digital image library was on it, organized with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. I was able to pull the hard drive, stuff it in a USB2 box, and access it on my Windows XP laptop. So the images are not lost. Any tips on how to preserve the metadata?

Her hard drive is still working, if that helps. I've also made a copy of all the images to a directory on my backup hard drive (a large USB2 drive). I had thought of moving all the images to this drive anyway, and the sudden crash has convinced me to go ahead with it.

I know that date is embedded in the JPEG files, so that's not a problem. But Elements also lets you tag your photos, title the, and add comments to them. I believe all of this info is stored in the "album" files that Elements creates in the "all users/application data/adobe" folder. But I'm afraid that will all break now that the paths are different (i.e. her drive is now "F:" and the photos I copied to the backup drive are at "E:\photos\adobe."

I had to muck with the file permissions on her hard drive (i.e. changed them all to 755 via Cygwin) so I could access them on my laptop while logged in as me. Prior to that, attempting to open her user folder would give me "access denied."

I haven't tried much at this point because I'm afraid of mucking things up. So I'm looking for best practices. I've burned everything to a DVD in case everything gets hosed.

By: baylink

baylink — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 09:16:23 -0800

Hijack: I'm in the same situation with Picasa. thumbs.db got me the individual image edits, but not the tagging, and reordering of pictures in the tags.

Can anyone help me while they're helping wheat? :-)

By: aliksd

aliksd — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:20:27 -0800

The tags are available and can be modified using Access. The adobe forums are incredbly helpful and have frequently addressed this problem. I've never tried to link in metafilter--here goes:
http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.eeb4f8b/

Sorry about the hard drive problem.

Comments on: How to save Adobe PS Elements metadata?

Question: How to save Adobe PS Elements metadata?

By: baylink

By: aliksd