Migration Path for Organizer?

Question

Out of curiousity, what are the "natural" migration paths from Organizer?  Do any software "read" the Organizer DB and convert to their own format (ACDSee?  Lightroom?)?
I'm not planning to move off Photoshop Elements any time soon, but Organizer doesn't appear to get a lot of attention from Adobe and lots of us like to have a Plan B.
I'm not too concerned about Slide Shows (I like JAlbum) or the "map" feature (other free or cheap applications do map tagging in an easier and more standard way).  I'm mostly concerned about tags, notes and collections.
I know you can force Organizer to write the tags out to the fiel in a standard way (IPTC categories I think) and comments and dates are written to the EXIF header.  But that's "Plan C" ;-}

Answer 1

solon48 wrote:
Before jumping into the migration/conversion process, I would like to get an excellent understanding of the problems and limitations of the conversion process. Is there a book or document that provides an extensive description of the conversion process and identifies comprehensively and fairly the problems and limitations of such a conversion?
Also, in order to learn to use efficiently Lightroom: is there one or two books that you would recommend me more than others?
Finally I have also a probably simple question: I am not motivated at all to use RAW because of the huge amount of Disk Space required for 30'000-50'000 RAW Photos (andbecause of the time and Disk space required for Backups of such large amounts of Photos). Will I be able to use all (or most?) nice features of Lightroom, even if I continue to use jpeg File formats?
There is no book that covers conversion from PSE to Lightroom.
In general, the conversion from PSE to Lightroom does most of what you would want it to do, so I wouldn't fear the process. The conversion from PSE to Lightroom is not perfect; for one thing, version sets are lost, as there is no concept of version sets in Lightroom. Stacks are maintained upon conversion. Tag hierarchies don't show up in LR exactly as they were in PSE; but its relatively easy to recreate your hierarchies in Lightroom.
I recommend Martin Evening's book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers. I have become quite dis-illusioned with Scott Kelby's books for a number of reasons, so I dis-recommend them.
Your disk space problems exist whether or not your photos are in Lightroom or PSE or neither or both. Lightroom doesn't make this worse or better. Getting more disk space makes this better. Lightroom is an excellent program for RAW photos; it is just as excellent for .jpg photos. What you lose in photo quality is not because of Lightroom's ability to handle .jpg photos; you lose in photo quality because your originals are .jpg and what ANY program can do with these is less than what ANY program can do with RAW photos.
And by the way, I find myself frightened by the thought that someone has 30000 to 50000 photos and doesn't do backups because of disk space problems. This is a recipe for having zero photos some day when your hard drive crashes. If you can't make backups because of disk space issues, I would strongly recommend that you remedy this by getting another hard disk before you address any conversion to Lightroom issues. Spend that money on a disk drive rather than on Lightroom