Bugs Ive Encountered In PSE 7

Question

Here are all the reproducible bugs Ive encountered in PSE 7. Problems added since my last posting on 10/5/08 are marked [N]. Because of limitations of the forum, this list is split across several messages.
Ive 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 thats 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 1.8 GHz processor, 3 GB of memory, and a 7200 RPM disk (the same speed as desktop disks).
File Management and Tagging
Major Problems
[N] File > Backup/Restore Catalog doesnt backup and restore audio in slide shows.
[N] 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.
[N] When converting a previous-version catalog whose photos are stored inside the catalog folder, as occurs when youve 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 isnt enough disk space to do the copy, the conversion will fail instantly with a generic non-explanatory error message.
[N] 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.
]Im very disappointed that Adobe didnt 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 doesnt 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 havent 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\.

Answer 1

<i>Part III</i><br /><br /><b>Color Management</b><br /><br /><i>Major Problems</i><br /><br />The Organizer considers photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB as untagged with a color profile, showing their colors incorrectly.<br /><br />The Original (left) image in the Save For Web window is displayed without using the photos profile, making it hard to compare the preview with the original.<br /><br /><b>Metadata</b><br /><br /><i>Major Problems</i><br /><br />[N] When setting the Organizers date/time for imported photos containing EXIF:DateTimeOriginal but not XMP:DateTimeOriginal, PSE 7 doesnt properly handle US Daylight Savings Time in years prior to 2007.<br /><br />[N] Edit > Adjust Date and Time doesnt properly handle US Daylight Savings Time when setting date/times many decades ago, e.g. October 5, 1961 12:00 PM.<br /><br />[N] 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.<br /><br />[N] 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.<br /><br />[N] The File > Write Keyword Tag command doesnt create or update .XMP sidecars for Nikon D300 or D80 .NEF raw files (but it does for Canon CR2 raw files).<br /><br />New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost. <br /><br />]If you set the date/time for a BMP, PDF, or Quicktime movie, or a file thats marked readonly, invoking the full Editor or Edit > Update Thumbnail will discard the adjusted date/time. <br /><br />Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes sets the wrong date/time for the EXIF:CreateDate and DateTimeOriginal, causing other tools to show the wrong date/time.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />File > Write Keyword Tags doesnt write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos.<br /><br /><i>Minor Problems</i><br /><br />[N] The Properties  Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the day is unknown.<br /><br />Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time unknown decrements the date by one day.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />With the Import EXIF Caption option turned off, captions pre-existing in a files EXIF:ImageDescription metadata field reappear in the Organizer after invoking the Full Editor.<br /><br /><b>Searching</b><br /><br /><i>Major Problems</i><br /><br />The timeline doesnt correctly display date ranges spanning many years. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />]The User Guide gives two examples of how to use category exclusion that just dont 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />Searching for 0 stars only doesnt work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5.<br /><br />Searching with date ranges doesnt properly handle time unknown. <br /><br /><i>Minor Problems</i><br /><br />[N] The Show All button sometimes doesnt appear if you quickly type a query into the Search text box and hit Enter.<br /><br />Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range. <br /><br />Show All doesnt clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing). <br /><br />Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isnt available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been. <br /><br />When searching, you can exclude a keyword tag and then include an album, but you cant do it in the other order.