Elements 10 organiser shutting down

Question

Have elements 10 photoshop and premiere, bought april 2012. When i open the organiser part of photoshop I get an error message and the programme shuts down.The editor continues to work OK.
Any suggestions on how to sort this out?Thanks

Answer 1

The problem is that you have a corrupted catalog. The reason that you can open them in Editor is because the photos you are trying to open are fine. The problem is only with the catalog. When Organiser opens, it looks for the current catalog. Before you can do anything, you must interrupt the process. As soon as you open Organiser, hit ctrl+shft+c this will get you into the catalog selection. The catalog with the word 'current' next to it is the corrupt file. If you have a back-up catlog, try selecting it. If organiser will open ANY other catalogue, you can be sure that the issue is not PSE.
You can try repairing the current catalog and then optimising it. Sometimes this works but generally if it's crashing every time, the problem is much deeper. However, give 'repair' a try. It will tell you that there is nothing to repair (that's got to be the world's most stupid message). Ignore this and press 'repair anyway'. If it still crashes, there is nothing that you can do other than to build a new catalog. (The advice of deleting the psa.prf file will do the same thing in opeing up the catalog box. This method is more straight-forward but if this doesn't work you can go to c:\users\{insert name}\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Elements Organiser\{insert the PSE version number e.g. 11}\Organiser\ Locate the psa.prf and delete it. When Organiser opens, it uses this file to locate the current catalog. If that's missing, it will ask you to select which catalog in the catalog selection box. That's a fairly cluncky way of doing it I think.
Before you create a new catalog, it's probably worth doing a bit of a Spring clean of that photo/pictures file. If you're like most people, it's probably loaded with unsorted photos, duplicates and folder structures that look like they were assembled by a madman (at least that's what mine looked like). The need to build a new catalog should prompt a tidy up. You don't want to be pushing a whole lot of useless files into the shiny new catalog you are going to build. I found all sorts of files that weren't photos or were in formats that haven't existed for 15 years, There were a couple of mpeg4 files and others whose extension made no sense at all and I can only assume that were created as some sort of temp or catalog files by other programs. Get rid of all of them from this folder. Fixing this up will save you tons of time later and will mean that everything is guaranteed to work. I also suspect this was at least partly the cause of the issues.
Next, make sure that your old tags are written into the metadata of the photos. You want to avoid having to tag everything again. Go back in to Organiser, press ctrl+shft+c and get into the catalog selector. Try opening either the corrupt catalog or a back up. Often even a corrupt catalog can be opened from this box. If it doesn't work the first time, try several times and try other files. It seems strange but sometimes, particularly after doing a repair, it will let you in once. Under File select 'Write keyword tag and properties info to photos'. If you liked the way in which your tag trees were set up, it might be worth copying them down. You are going to have to rebuild the basic structure. It doesn't take as long as it sounds. Knowing what it looked like before helps speed things up a bit.
Go back to the catalog box ctrl+shft+c and select New. Name the new catalogue. Press ctrl+shft+g and navigate to where your photos are. If you have embedded the tags into the metadata, it will ask you whether you want to bring that across with the photos. Select all of the tags and let it do its magic.
All of the tags will be stored under the Keyword 'Imported keyword tags' It's usually the last option on the Organise tab/ Keyword Tags. Now, having them there is pretty inconvenient. But if you can set up the basis structure of your tags, you can drag and drop the tags from 'Imported Keyword tags' into the various people/places/events headings that you want. If you've got hundreds of tags, this might take an hour or so, but its the longest part of the process. Everything else is really quick. I rebuilt a catalog of 20 000 photos and about 70 tags in an hour . . . after spending days trying to repair a corrupted catalog. My advice is that if it can't be easily repaired, it can't be repaired. Cut your losses and create a new catalog.
I then did a find for untagged files. There was mostly junk that I missed in my clean-out. I largely deleted this and also removed it from the hard drive. It should now be perfect.
I've tried the same procedure on PSE 7, 9 & 12 and it's basically the same for each. And a final piece of advice is ALWAYS embed your tags onto the photo metadata. If you ever have a disaster, it's so much easier to fix.
Hope this helps. Remember, it's not as hard or as confusing as it sounds. Don't let that constant Organiser crash frustrate you any longer.