Bugs I've Encountered In PSE 7

Question

Here are all the reproducible bugs I’ve encountered in PSE 7.  Problems added since my last posting are marked [N].  In the coming weeks, I’ll evaluate PSE 8 to see how many of these have been fixed.
I’ve reported all of these problems to Adobe. Almost all of them are in the Organizer.  Based on all the reports on the forums, it appears that the Editor has far fewer problems than the Organizer.   Perhaps that’s because the Editor shares the same code with the professional Photoshop, while the Organizer appears to be an orphaned consumer product whose development Adobe has moved offshore.
For reference, my computer is a midrange Vista laptop with a dual-core 1.9 GHz processor, 4 GB of memory, and a 7200 RPM disk (the same speed as desktop disks).
File Management and Tagging
Major Problems
[N] The conversion of a catalog from PSE 6 to PSE 7 doesn’t properly handle photos that are stored within the PSE 6 catalog folder (as occurs when PSE 6 was used to restore a catalog from a backup).  As a result, it isn’t possible to save photos in version sets, and PSE 7 will create duplicate thumbnails in the Organizer for an edited file.
File > Backup/Restore Catalog doesn’t backup and restore audio in slide shows.
Using Folder Location view to move a folder containing hidden files imported in the catalog will silently fail to move the hidden files and will leave the unhidden files disconnected in the catalog.
When converting a previous-version catalog whose photos are stored inside the catalog folder, as occurs when you’ve previously used File > Restore Catalog with New Location, PSE 7 needlessly copies all those photos. If you have a very large catalog, this will waste huge amounts of disk space; and if there isn’t enough disk space to do the copy, the conversion will fail instantly with a generic non-explanatory error message.
After reconnecting a file on a network drive, PSE will let you import the file a second time, failing to recognize it as a duplicate.  The catalog is left in an inconsistent state, with two entries in the volume table for the network drive, one upper case and one lower case.
The Organizer fails very ungracefully when two drives have the same volume serial number, e.g. because of the use of a disk-cloning utility.
I’m very disappointed that Adobe didn’t add the three lines of code that would have issued a warning when it discovered two drives with the same number.  While most people will never encounter this, when it strikes someone, its symptoms are very mysterious.
The Reconnect command fails to reconnect when: you move your photos to a new drive, assign the drive the letter of the old drive to the new one, and leave both drives connected to your computer.
If a hard drive containing photos in the catalog gets its drive letter reassigned by Windows, then the left-hand folder pane of Display > Folder Location view shows the old drive letter, not the new one, as containing the photos.
This sounds innocuous, but it led a user on the forums to select the wrong drive when dragging and dropping a folder, permanently deleting some files.  This bug and the previous one with Reconnect have the same underlying cause – the Organizer doesn’t update drive letters in its catalog.
Folder Location view shows incorrect folder contents when more than one keyword tag is selected in the Keyword Tags pane.
Based on reports on the forums, there appear to be other situations where Folder Location view shows incorrect folder contents, but they haven’t been easy to reproduce.
The Restore Catalog command puts the wrong path into the restored catalog for folders whose name starts with the catalog name, and it will mark files in those folders as missing. For example if the catalog is named “houses”, and a folder containing photos in the catalog is named “houses photos”, files in the restored catalog will have the path “houses\ photos\” instead of “houses photos\”.
Minor Problems
In File > Export, the Common Basename can no longer be empty, and a hyphen is added automatically, so you can no longer get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.
You can get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. but you can’t get files named p1.jpg, p2.jpg, etc. – a hyphen is still added in that case.
Setting the Apply Metadata > Author or Copyright fields or the option Preserve Current Filename In XMP of the advanced options of the Photo Downloader causes duplicate files to be downloaded and imported.
Integration with Photoshop.com
Major problems
[N] Photoshop.com shows an incorrect date/time taken for photos with unknown month, day, or time.
For photos taken in years prior to 1970, the date/time shows as 12/31/1969 08:00 AM.  For photos with year taken 1970 or later, the date/time shows as the the first month/day/minute/second in that time period in UTC that then gets converted to local time; e.g. “7/2/2005” gets shown as “7/1/2005 5:00 PM” for a user in PDT.
[N] Photoshop.com doesn’t obey the EXIF Orientation metadata field and can show photos rotated incorrectly, e.g. if they were rotated with the PSE option Edit > Preferences > Files > Rotate JPEGs/TIFFs Using Orientation Metadata.
Changes to the order of photos in a PSE album aren’t synced to Photoshop.com, and vice versa.
Adding a photo to a second synced album will cause Photoshop.com to lose any changes you’ve made with PSE’s Edit > Adjust Date And Time.
If you you rename a file that’s synced with Photoshop.com, Photoshop.com doesn’t pick up the new name (important if you’re using Photoshop.com as a backup service).
Only the top photo in a version set is synced with Photoshop.com (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup version sets).
When a stack is synced with Photoshop.com, all the photos in the stack are synced, but the fact that they were in a stack is lost (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup stacks).
Map View
Major Problems
Map view is unusably slow with more than about 6-8,000 mapped photos.
When I tested PSE 7 by importing 12,000 photos (the size of my catalog) that had GPS locations, the red push-pins didn’t blink uncontrollably as they did in PSE 6.   But the Organizer crashed a number of times when I tried to zoom and pan the Map view until I was able to scroll the map to another country and then back again.   The CPU continued to consume 80% of a single CPU (40% of two), even 10 minutes after I closed Map view. When I selected Limit Search to Map Area, PSE took over a minute to respond.
It takes 5 seconds to assign a keyword tag to a photo if there are 1,000 or more photos with map locations.
In PSE 7, it takes 3 seconds with 1,000 photos, 12 seconds with 8,000 photos, and 18 seconds with 12,000 photos.
Giving a map location to a tag assigned to hundreds of photos makes both the Keywords pane and the Map view unusably slow.
Giving a map location to a tag assigned to 2000 photos makes assigning any keyword tag to a photo very slow (see above).    Searching on keyword tags takes 15 seconds, and a Show All takes 15 seconds.
Removing the map push-pin of a tag assigned to hundreds of photos mistakenly tries to update the metadata of each photo, which can take tens of minutes and fill up your recycle bin.
The weird thing is that assigning a map location to the tag doesn’t try to write the metadata of files with that tag.
Moving map locations always fails, silently (too bad if you want to record backcountry locations not namable via a place name).
If a photo with GPS coordinates is imported, it doesn’t show as a red push-pin on the map.
Scrolling the map or restarting the Organizer causes the pin to appear.
Color Management
Major Problems
The Organizer considers photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB as untagged with a color profile, showing their colors incorrectly.
Metadata
Major Problems
When setting the Organizer’s date/time for imported photos containing EXIF:DateTimeOriginal but not XMP:DateTimeOriginal, PSE 7 doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time in years prior to 2007.
Edit > Adjust Date and Time doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time when setting date/times many decades ago, e.g. October 5, 1961 12:00 PM.
In Thumbnail View, the Organizer incorrectly orders files that have unknown time. For example, it will show a file dated 12/25/1976 8:00 PM PST after a file dated 12/26/1976 (unknown time) on a computer in time zone PST.
If you set a file's date/time fields to all unknown with Edit > Adjust Date And Time, the value of EXIF:DateTimeOriginal isn't cleared by File > Write Keyword Tag.
The File > Write Keyword Tag command doesn’t create or update .XMP sidecars for Nikon D300 or D80 .NEF raw files (but it does for Canon CR2 raw files).
New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost.
See http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Date/times_of_files for details and workarounds.
[N] Edit > Adjust Date and Time > Shift To New Starting Date And Time and > Shift By Set Number Of Hours writes the time in UTC rather than local time, as required by the standard, causing other tools to show the wrong date/time.
File > Write Keyword Tags and Properties fails to write the map location (GPS coordinates) of TIFFs (tested with TIFFs produced by the PSE Editor and the Nikon Coolscan V, Nikon Coolscan 5000, and Epson 4490 scanners).
File > Write Keyword Tags doesn’t write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos.
[N] The Organizer ignores correctly formatted EXIF GPS locations in some files that many other programs can read without trouble; this may be because the EXIF is encoded in little-endian byte order.
Minor Problems
[N] Deselecting the option Use “Last Modified” Date If EXIF Date Is Not Found does not work – the last-modified date is always used for an imported file that doesn’t contain an EXIF date.
The Properties – Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the month, day, or time is unknown.
Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time “unknown” decrements the date by one day.
When you save an edited photo as a new file but not in a version set, the edited version picks up the date/time and caption of the original but not the keyword tags, star rating, or notes.
With the Import EXIF Caption option turned off, captions pre-existing in a file’s EXIF:ImageDescription metadata field reappear in the Organizer after invoking the Full Editor.
Searching
Major Problems
The timeline doesn’t correctly display date ranges spanning many years.
Using the Keyword Tags pane, you can no longer exclude a parent category from a search, e.g. exclude all photos tagged with any tag in the People category.
The User Guide gives two examples of how to use category exclusion that just don’t work in PSE 6 or 7.  Interestingly, you can almost work around this by doing a text search of “not <category tag>”, e.g. “not People”.   But this will also exclude photos that happen to have the word “people” in their filenames, captions, or notes, probably not what you want.
Find > By History > Imported On sorts the photo dates alphabetically, rather than by date/time, and it takes a couple of minutes on a large catalog, making the command almost useless; and it shows a scary message “Deleting Keyword Tags”.
[N] Searching with the Find Bar for “1 star and lower” doesn’t show photos with 0 stars.
Find > By Details > Rating Is Lower Than 1 Star does work.
Searching for “0 stars only” doesn’t work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5.
Searching with date ranges doesn’t properly handle time “unknown”.
Minor Problems
The Show All button sometimes doesn’t appear if you quickly type a query into the Search text box and hit Enter.
Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range.
Show All doesn’t clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing).
Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isn’t available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been.
When searching, you can exclude a keyword tag and then include an album, but you can’t do it in the other order.
User Interface
Major Problems
On 1024x768 displays, and sometimes at higher resolutions, the Editor Print window is positioned to perfectly obscure the scroll bar of the drop-down list of printer profiles, leading people to think their printer’s profiles aren’t available.
This bug occurred with higher-resolution displays in PSE 6.
The menu bars don’t display if you have changed the screen DPI to be larger than 96 (as many people do on today’s ubiquitous high-res displays).
There is a workaround for both PSE 6 and 7. Set the option > Edit > Preferences > General > Use System Font.  The result isn’t that pretty, since some of the application text will be large and some will be small, but it’s functional, and you’ll still be able to use the higher DPI with all your other applications.
Minor Problems
In the Properties window of Full Screen mode, if you click in the Notes field and do Ctrl-A to select all the text, then click in the Caption field and do Ctrl-A to select its text, the notes remain highlighted.
In the Organizer, Help > System Info reports the wrong amount for “Built-in Memory” on computers with more than 2GB of installed memory.  (The command reports the correct amount in the Editor.)
The setting of View > Show Borders Around Thumbnails isn’t remembered after you restart PSE.
Copying a paragraph from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the Notes field of a keyword tag causes some of the spaces between words to be deleted.
Ctrl-A to select all text doesn’t work in the text fields of the Properties window.
Interestingly, you can use ctrl-A in the text fields of the full-screen mode Properties window.
In the full Editor, if at least one open photo is minimized to the Project Bin, Ctrl-Tab no longer cycles through the open windows.
Dialogs in the Editor sometimes bounce back when you try to move them.
Dates are shown by Display > Import Batch as 2\20\2008 rather than 2/20/2008.
In Create > Slide Show > Slide Show Preferences dialog, you can't use backspace or delete to clear the text in the Static and Transition Duration fields -- you need to select the text and then type over the selection (non-standard Windows behavior).
Escape doesn’t close the full-screen-mode Properties dialog.
You can’t use the Windows Explorer Tile command to tile the PSE Organizer and Editor windows.
The Editor window can’t be resized the standard Windows way by grabbing any edge, just the lower-right corner.
Alt doesn’t underline the shortcut letters of top-level menu items in the Full Editor (but it does in the Organizer).
The width of the Editor's Palette Bin can't be adjusted by dragging the left edge, as you can with all the other similar panes (Project Bin, Organizer Bin, Map View).
Slide Shows
Major Problems
The duration of a video clip included in a Slide Show is set to the default duration, not the length of the video clip, and right-click Edit Duration doesn’t change the clip’s duration.
For video clips, PSE 7 doesn’t enable the command to change the duration as it does for photos. But you can work around this by using Add Media > Photos And Videos From Folder to add the clip to the show.
An audio caption attached to a photo isn’t imported into a slide show even though the option Include Audio Captions as Narration is selected.
Editor
Minor Problems
[N] The Editor crashes if you invoke Quick Fix and use just one Touch Up tool (e.g. Whiten Teeth) and then save the file (but your changes are correctly saved).
The File > Save For Web command doesn’t remember the last settings (e.g. file format and quality) after your restart the Editor.
For a workaround, see http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Allow_Save_For.

Answer 1

Just kidding.    But, are you going to give us a bug comparison between 7 and 8 ?   I will probably sit version 8 out and get 9 next year.  Thanks for the list!
Juergen