PSE 11 Organizer - depressingly junky software

After rebuilding all of my 90k pics into a new structure, PSE 11 organizer now comes up, I leave it alone, and it crashes. Over and over again. It covers up its tracks like a little boy stealing in a candy store. Why isn't someone fixing bugs in this thing? At LEAST when it crashes, it could put out an error message, then a bug report could be written and then maybe, just maybe it could be fixed.
I just rebuilt the entire catalog, placed all my photos into folders by years because PSE had become completely unusable. Now, again it is a basket case.
This is the single most troublesome piece of software I have had the misfortune to buy. Windows 7, 16GB RAM, two HD's with over 200GB free. I solicit your ideas or whatever you care to say about how you feel about PSE.

I bought Lightroom two years ago when I thought Organizer was less than I wanted. I still use Photshop and Premier Elements but have not looked at Organizer for a long time. From my point of view, Lightroom and Elements are made for people with my kind of budget and work wonderfully together.

Similar Messages

LR keyword search (coming from PSE Organizer 9)

I am using LR 4.1 RC2. This morning using LR I upgraded my PSE Organizer 9 catalog. It has about 50k photos with keywords and star ratings. It seems like the upgrade worked because I can now see all my photos in LR and they have the keywords and star ratings. Hurray! I am having some trouble figuring out how to do keyword searches in LR though so I hope someone can help.
In Organizer there are several ways to do keyword searchs:
1. Use the Keyword Tags panel and click on one or multiple keywords. Organizer will then display only the photos that have all of the keywords, i.e., it uses AND. This is very easy and is great for finding things very quickly when using one or more keywords.
2. Use Find > By Details (Metadata) which allows searching by multiple keywords and the choice of AND or OR. You can also combine the keyword search with other metadata so that, for example, you can find all Bird photos taken in Florida using a Canon 7D + 100-400mm at ISO 400 in April 2011 that have 3 or more stars. I use this option to search fairly often.
3. Use the Search bar and type in search expressions using NOT, AND, and OR. I occasionally use this for complicated searches that #2 can't handle. This is a pain in the butt to use since you must type everything out, but when #1 or #2 can't do it (which is rare) it is great to have this option too.
Several months ago I read on the PSE forum a thread about using Organizer and an Adobe developer recommended upgrading to LR since it was more flexible and meant for professionals and serious amateurs. Therefore even though I have read the LR help info and can't find how to do sophisticated searches I am sure it is possible and I just haven't found it yet. Here is what I have found so far:
1. Use the Keyword List panel where I can select only one keyword.
2. Use the Library Filter bar where I can do a ctrl-click on multiple keywords, but this results in an OR instead of AND. In other words, if I click on Birds and then ctrl-click on Florida I get all bird photos and all Florida photos (the union, not the intersection). This is probably almost never what a person wants.
I hope someone can tell me or point me to documentation so that I can at least do as much as the amateur Organizer can do. Thank you!

John, thanks for the reply. Yes, I am discovering that the amateur Organizer has much better searching capability than the professional Lightroom. I have already mentioned in my post the flexibility and power and Organizer is not even as good as some other programs. I had spent time investigating LR, but mostly raw conversion and non-destructive editing. I had, I think naturally, assumed that LR's database functions would be at least as good as the cheap Organizer. I never dreamt that they would not be as good or as easy to use. I sometimes wonder what happens in corporations when they seem to forget their own past and come out with new stuff that is a step or two backwards compared to their older, lower end stuff. Oh well.
Thank you very much for the tip about having more than one instance of keywords in the filter bar. That helps.
After I posted I discovered using Smart Collections and that helps a bit too. It is sort of a cutdown, less user friendly version of the Find By Details (Metadata) function in Organizer. It also means that for just a one time search I would have to create a smart collection and then delete it. What's with that, I wonder? Of course, if you often want to do that same search then it is good (Organizer allows you to save the search too), but most of the time I just do it one time. Oh well.
I looked at the Any Tag plugin and also the Any Filter plugin (same website) and I might download them to try out.
What I would like for Adobe to do is have their LR developers (probably a more prestigious development team in the company) talk to their Organizer developers (maybe a less prestigious development team) so that the LR developers can learn a bit about this. Yes, I have been a software developer for many years so I do understand a bit about development organizations. LR and PS are standard bearing products so their teams probably are held in higher esteem. Time to be humble and talk to other people though, IMO.
If any LR developers happen to read this then please know that I mean no offense. But, please, at least, take a look at Organizer and see if you can come up with something simpler that requires less typing of multiple long keywords and more powerful searching using various types of metadata. I am not saying Organizer is the best out there, but it is much better than LR in this case.

PSE Organizer hangs up on start up on my Macbook

A few weeks ago PSE 9 Organizer began to not show the thumbnails if I tried to display more that approximately 12 photo's at one time. As long as I kept the photos displayed to less than 12-15 i was able to see the them. If I picked a photo to edit the editor works perfectly. The problem is with the Organizer. Now the Organizer will no longer work at all. When I try to start it up it opens and then just hangs up and I get a message that it is not responding. I tried to just let it run for hours but it remains hung up. I get a spinning colored circle.
I uninstalled and reinstalled the software but I had the same issue when I tried to restart. It will open and show me my files and immediately hang up and display the spinning colored circle.
Any ideas how to fix this issue.
Mike

Barbara,
Thank you for your reply. I was able to get to the catalog manager and run the repair option. the program indicated it did not find any errors but I ran the repair anyhow. I then ran the optimizer. I then opened the PSE Organizer and it took about 20 minutes but it did open. I now have a better definition of the problem. The issue seems to be related to the most recently loaded folders. When I click on one of my old folders the thumbnails pop right up displaying as many as I want to look at. When I click on one of my recent folders, three of them in all, the thumbnails will only display if I increase the photo size to where just 4 of them appear in on the display. If I try to do anything in these folders it take several minutes to execute and i get the spinning colored circle.
Could I have corrupt files or did I possibly inadvertently change a setting when I pulled the pictures in off of the card reader that could cause this?
Thanks again for your help.
Mike

Why can't I download photos from my harddrive in PSE Organizer 8?

I've tried 3 different times to download my photos in PSE Organizer 8 from my harddrive. Each time I tried a smaller group. I just upgraded from Elements 4 and I was impressed with some of the features with the organizer and decided to try and use it. I have all my photos organized in folders and sub folders. According to the help information, I should be able to just tell it to download all my photos, including sub folders and once downloaded, I can click on folders view (can't quite remember exactly what it's called) and I will find all my photos organized the same way. I have Windows XP. I do have a large amount of photos. The first try included all of them for a total of 11,644, but part of these are .pub and .doc files which cannot be download. The last try was 8,843 photos which, again included files that cannot be downloaded. I was really hoping to download my pictures in an already organized way. Is this possible? Is it that it just can't handle downloading that many at a time, or could it be some other problem?

What do you see that tells you the photos didn't import into the Organizer? Do you get an error message? Does the Organizer appear to be empty when you finish importing?
More importantly, this is not the correct process when moving from PSE4 to PSE8. You need to convert your PSE4 catalog. To do this, open PSE8 and select File->Catalog->Convert.
My advice is to forget importing existing photos into the Organizer, and convert the catalog as described above.

Catalog DVDs in PSE organizer

Hi folks,
I am looking for some search terms to find recommendations on how to use PSE organizer to catalog several hundred hours of personal video footage on DVD.
I've tried searching Adobe's forums, Google and Elements Village to find some clues if Organizer can be used for this. Ideally, I would grab a screenshot from DVD, store it as a thumbnail reference the DVD name, and then be able to use tags (ideally, I'd like to use my existing still catalog tags) to lookup scenes for editing in Premiere Elements.
Again, not looking immediately for the answers in this thread - just how to find the answers if they already exist.
thanks
-j

Ideally, I would grab a screenshot from DVD, store it as a thumbnail
reference the DVD name, and then be able to use tags (ideally, I'd like
to use my existing still catalog tags) to lookup scenes for editing in
Premiere Elements.
James,
Interesting question.
You say you have searched on the Adobe forums and Elements Village, so my first suggestion is that you add another source. Muvipix.com is a site formed by several book authors and Adobe Premiere Elements forum participants. It has free forums and also subscription offerings. It has been a great source of Premiere Elements information for me.
My expereince -
I have taken a screen shot of a .mpg file (containing SD MPEG-2 video from a HD camcorder) and used it to represent the video by saving the screen shot using a file name that correlates to the video file. I also used the Organizer command to modify the "date taken" field it uses for Organizer sequencing to be the same date in this screen shot jpeg as the video file from which it was taken. (Ideally this is the date the video was originally recorded.) The screen shot can be captured from the video using either Premiere Elements or the Photoshop Elements Editor.
My interpretation of your post is that
your DVD disc is of a video DVD format: it probably has a folder structure with DVD menus and several files which contain the video.You want to effectively tag the contents of this DVD disc with Adobe Elements Organizer tags.
Because you are working with a DVD video disc (rather than my single video file on the hard drive), there are additional questions for your scenario.
So I suggest that you also post your question over on the muvipix forums at
http://muvipix.com/phpBB3/index.php
Those forums are divided into sections and despite that fact that this started here as a Photoshop Ekements question, I recommend that you post in the muvipix Premiere Elements corner. If you don't currently have Prem Elem installed, I suggest choosing the most recent version subforum - PE version 8: otherwise choose the version that you have installed.
Barb O

PSE Organizer tags to file metadata?

PSE Organizer tags are not automatically included in the picture files' metadata.
I have observed that tags are transferred to file metadata if you do the following:
1. Tag the native picture file using the organizer
2. Create and save an edited copy of our native file, using the editor
Result: Organizer tags are included in the file metadata, for both the edited copy AND the native file.
Is there any way to tell PSE to automatically include tags in the file metadata, or second best; is there a way to do this manually "en gross" (i.e. for a large selection of files in one operation)?
Finn

File>Write tag and metadata information to photos write the tag, GPS and other info to the photo file.
~V

How do PSE Organizer import photo tags? not found

After importing all my picture to one catalogue in the organizer of PSE 9 for Mac, I recognize that my photo tags which were set in Lightroom and save in the photos are not available in the oragnizer.
Even I am not able to find those tags or can use my tags for filtering.
Is there a switch inside PSE to activate my tags or what ever.
Thanks for your help!

Did Lightroom write the tags to the photo files? Lightroom doesn't do that automatically, you have to turn on an option in Lightroom.
Which brings up a 2nd point. Why do you want to use two different "organizers", one in PSE and one in Lightroom. This seems to me to be pointless ... extra work, no benefit.
If I had to pick one "organizer", I would simply use the Lightroom Library Module. It doesn't make sense to me to pick the PSE Organizer in this case.

PSE Organizer quitting

My PSE organizer keeps quitting unexpectedly, I am also loosing images during editing process. I am using PSE 13 on a Mac with most recent operating system. I have been through all trouble shooting sugestions I have been given except resetting preferences. It was suggested that I use finder to browse for and rename a preference file ~/Library/Applications Support/Elements Organizer /<version> / Organizer. Finder is not recognizing this file name and all im getting is " file not found" Getting very frustrated with this issue and Adobe posture with support for PSE. Would really appreciate more advise.

Hi,
Please give the instructions mentioned in the article: http://helpx.adobe.com/elements-organizer/kb/organizer-crashes-launch-does-not-start.html
a try.
Thanks,
Anwesha

Win7, PSE10: The PSE-Organizer Picture Selection jumps randomly after deleting a picture

Hi,
I'm using PSE10 on a Win7 (64bit) OS. When I delete a picture (from catalogue and harddrive) the PSE-Organizer tends to jump down several pictures (Haven't been able to determine a fixed number), so I have to go up again and browse through the same pics a couple of times.
Has anyone experienced similar malfunctions or has an inkling, why my program behaves like a squirrel on caffeine?
Hopefully
Dave.

Hi Belgatan999,
The behavior that I am aware of in this case, is that Organizer tries to maintain focus on the first media shown on Top Left of the grid.
Let me elaborate it more. Suppose you are seeing some images at a particular scroll postion. Notice the first image shown on top left corner of the grid (Say this to be A). Now you delete a media and after the grid refreshes in such a way that so as the maintain focus on A. That is now Organizer changes grid so as to necessarily show A somewhere in grid. Please let me know if you are not seeing this behavior.
~Surendra

[BUG ?] PSE Organizer - Sort by file size

Hello,
When trying to sort by file size with PSE Organizer, it only takes into account the recently imported pictures.
I have recently migrated my catalog from PhotoShop Album V1.0 to PSE Organizer without problem (or at least I solve all of them, thanks to John !).
Now, when I ask all pictures with a file size higher than 2000 kb, I only have the files that I recently imported... Is there any solution to also include all pictures (I paid attention not to select the recent album, I show all pictures - but maybe I do something else wrong ??)
Thanks,
Kamayana

johnrellis wrote:
Interesting. When you do Edit > Update Thumbnail, PSE rereads all the metadata from the file except for keyword tags. So your hypothesis that the file size information was not converted from the PSA catalog sounds reasonable. Just one of many bugs in the conversion process.
Yes, EDIT > UPDATE THUMBNAIL, that's what I done (sorry, I am french and I downloaded the french version, so my translation are sometimes erroneous).
Anyway, it solve my problem, thanks to you for helping me, you finally helped me to be curious and to search the problem.
Kamayana

Mail Client choice with PSE Organizer 12 / Windows 8.1

The (french) doc says Edition > Preferences > partage (share)
(Windows) Microsoft Outlook®, pour définir cette application comme messagerie par défaut.
(Windows) Microsoft Outlook, to define this option as the default mail system
(Windows) Service de messagerie Adobe, si vous n’utilisez ni Outlook ni Outlook Express, mais que vous voulez envoyer des messages électroniques directement depuis Elements Organizer.
(Windows) Adobe mail service, if you don't use Outlook or Outlook express, but you still want to send mail directly from PSE Organizer
.... other choices left according to OS version
The only choice is ... no choice: Adobe mail service ... and I want to use Outlook ...
Thanks for help
Same request already in french .. may I'll get be more success in English
[email protected]

did you install the dns role on the server?
it might also need to have ad installed as well, as part of the org
DirectAccess requires Active Directory. The OP wouldn't have been able to install the role in the first place if he didn't have it, and since AD requires DNS, your suggestions are incorrect.

Can anyone demystify the PSE Organizer catalog backup options?

I need to backup my catalog--preferably just my catalog, not all my pictures (the picture files themselves are already backed up). More accurately, I would like my automated online backup service (Carbonite) to back up my PSE Organizer catalog for me, just as it has already backed up my pictures. But the catalog is in some caddywompus location that Carbonite doesn't back up by default. I think I can manually override Carbonite's default settings and tell it to back that location up anyway, if I only knew where and what files to look for.
If I click on Help > System Info..., PSE tells me my catalog is located in C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Elements Organizer\Catalogs\clayscatalog. It doesn't go all the way to the file level, just down to that last folder, which shares the name of my catalog. But I have no idea which file inside of that folder is my catalog, or what to backup. Inside that folder called clayscatalog, there are the following items:
BreezeData(folder)
CAXMPFiles(folder)
syncdb(folder)
backupCt.dat
catalog.pse9db
collstatus.dat
face.thumb.9.cache
itemData.mk4
rmf.3.cache
tagstatus.dat
thumb.5.cache
watch.2.cache
Which of these files/folders should I be targeting for backup, all of them? And which would I browse to find in order to restore my catalog if my computer ever crashed and I needed to do a restore? Assuming all my photos are backed up and able to be restored to the same folder hierarchy, I assume one of these files/folders is going to have that information and be able to restore everything easily, preserving all my photo ratings, captions, tags, etc., right?
It would seem to make sense for the PSE to offer the option when you choose Backup from the file menu to back up all your catalog data only, as opposed to only having the option to backup everything, including all the picture files. Because I'm sure many people, like me, already have their picture files backed up and don't have need for that. Any guidance on this would be much appreciated.
Clay

First, short answer : the catalog consists in the whole folder you found. All those files are used in the organizer, but the .cache files which may have a big size will be regenerated by the organizer if they are deleted. The problem is this operation may be very long, so you will be better if you save everything;
If you use the backup and restore feature in the Organizer, you'll only have only to tell the restore process where your backup (of everything, files and folders) is located.
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Backing_up_your

PSE Organizer 12 crashes soon after opening

When I open Organizer directly from the desktopn, it asks if I want to back up my catalog. I decline. A few seconds later 'Elements 12 organizer has stopped working'.
I recently upgraded my installation from PSE 11 to PSE 12. I run Windows 8 on an i3 Gen2. My catalog has ~ 30K photos stretching back 12 years. The catalog also contains video. I was having a similar issue with 11. I created a new catalog, thinking that the catalog file may have become corrupted. That solved the problem for a couple of weeks, but the issue has now returned. I want to like this product as it's easy to use, but the constant crashes have to go!
What can I do to help solve this issue?

Hi,
Please refer to :
http://psekb.blogspot.in/2013/03/pse-organizer-is-not-launching.html
Thanks,
Anwesha

All of my photos have disappeared from PSE Organizer 13 (after I upgraded it).

All of my photos have disappeared from PSE Organizer 13 (after I upgraded it). The files are all on the HD. When I try and reimport them, Organizer says they are already in there and will not allow me to proceed. When I highlight a keyword, Get the message "NO MEDIA TO BE DISPLAYED". Perhaps I am dense, but I find the Search function of the Forum to be near useless, unless I just happen to type the Exact name of a topic.
I now have no access to perhaps 35,000 files from 12 years of using PSE!
GFrey

Which operating system are you running on? Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
Which version did you upgrade from? updated from PSE 13 to PSE 13.1
In the organizer, which view are you using - in the View menu is Details checked or unchecked - does it make any difference? was unchecked now checked. Now can see the other files, but the Keyword tags that I had attached in the past does not bring up the selected frames.
In the View menu, select Media types - are all checked? At this point I have only Ohotos and videos checked
In View menu, select Hidden Files - is Show All Files checked? yes
I'm assuming that you are in Media view, what happens if you select People Places or Events? get groupings of files with those keywords.
Brian
Thanks Brian, at least some of my problems are gone, just can't get the keyword sorting to work correctly

Deleting files in PSE-organizer

Hi,
I have 2 questions concerning the handling of picture files in the PSE-organizer.
When I want to reduce a large amount of pictures (800 and more) i.e. after holidays I use the organizer to get a quick overview of the shots which are immediately to be deleted.
Unfortunately, every single deleting process has to be confirmed when the intention is to remove the pictures both from the catalogue and the harddrive. You have to activate a checkbox every time! I would like to know whether it is possible to suppress that message and checkbox action.
The second problem I have is that sometimes (not every time!) when I delete a couple of pictures within the organizer this action will move the view to the very first picture again so you have to scroll down to the last chosen pictures again. For example I have 700 pictures, reach pictures 511, 512 and 516 which I delete then the organizer would do that but jump back to picture 1. So I have to scroll down to picture 517 again to resume my selections of good and bad material. That can be very soul-killing with 700 pictures and maybe 200 to delete ;-)
Does anybody know how to help me with these 2 problems.
Thank you in advance for your support.
Kind regards from Germany,
Marco

It's not possible to set a default for the checkbox (poor design by Adobe). However, here's a workaround:
Mark the files you want to delete as hidden using Edit > Visibility > Mark As Hidden (ALT+F2). When you're one, review all the hidden files by doing View > Show Only Hidden Files. Then do Edit > Select All and delete all of them at once.
If you're already using hidden files for other purposes, you could use a tag instead, though it wouldn't be quite as fast to drag a tag to photo as typing ALT+F2 (but still faster than waiting for the interminably slow Delete dialog box).

PSE 11 Organizer - depressingly junky software

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for