LR and Organizer playing nicely together?

Question

Hi all,
I am an advanced LR user.  I just started working with Premier Elements and do use Photoshop Elements (on the very few occasions that LR won't do the trick).  The Elements series uses Adobe Organizer to locate images and video clips, so I figured this is an important tool to get to know.  I pointed Organizer at the top of my image and video hierarchy and told it to import.  After about 12 hours of my MacBook Pro become a veritable flamethrower, the import process was finished.  Apparently Organizer was able to successfully read all of the tagging done in LR and even pick out some faces.  Very Cool!
So now the big test came.  I imported more fresh photos and videos onto my disk via Lightroom.  I then started up Organizer hoping that it might just automatically see the new assets and add them to its catalog.  No dice, but no surprise :-(  I was able to manually import the new images into Organizer, but that is a pain.  Is there any way to get LR and Organizer more in synch?  Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Paul

Answer 1

Paul's issue is that he wants to use Premier Elements to author videos from video clips and still images. Premier is indeed tightly integrated with the Elements Organizer and relies on it as the primary method for accessing clips and images.  Unfortunately, I don't think there is a convenient way to have the two play together nicely.  Consider the approaches:
- Use LR's library module to tag and find clips and images. This approach has some serious issues: LR doesn't handle the range of video formats that Elements does (though it may be adequate for you), and it has limited metadata capabilities for video (you can't change the capture time, for example).  You'll have to export images you've edited in LR to JPEG format, since Elements won't understand LR's internal representation of edits.  And you'll have to use File > Open in Elements, rather than the Organizer or LR's library, to include clips and images in your video projects, which could be fairly clumsy.
- Use LR's library module to tag clips and images but use Organizer to find clips and images for inclusion in Elements projects. In this approach, you first import all clips and images into LR's catalog and tag them.  In the Organizer, you enable the File > Watch Folders functionality to monitor the same set of folders where you import clips and images, and whenever you start Organizer, it will automatically import new clips and images from those folders.  A couple of additional problems with this: LR doesn't write metadata (tags, captions, and dates) back to video clips, so the Organizer won't see your metadata changes. Also, if in LR you change an image's metadata after it's already imported into Organizer, there's no way to get those changes into the Organizer's catalog.
- Use LR's library module to tag and find images, but use the Organizer to tag and find  video clips.  This will have a mix of the issues of the previous two approaches.