PSE 5.0 cloning ?

OK... here I am again struggling w/ 5.0 (I know... very old). I need to copy a rectangular shape. A rather large rectangle. I don't want the circle. By increasing the point size with the circle, using the clone stamp, I get too much other stuff with it. I just want to be able to size a rectangle the size I need. Can this be done and if so, how?

Open a blank layer above your background layer
Access the rectangular marquee tool in the tool box. In the tool's option bar, under mode, select fixed size and enter width & height values. You can also select mode:normal and drag out the rectangle to suit. You will see "marching ants" around the rectangle
Go to Edit>stroke>outline selection, enter width of stroke, color, position>inside
Go to select>deselect
Please report back with your progress

Similar Messages

PSE 7 always shutting down while cloning, etc.

I'm running AMD Athlon 64 2.2ghz, 3.5g memory. When I "push" Elements by cloning or working large areas of a photo I get a message that says "PSE 7 has to close". Any ideas?

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why the PSE Editor might crash, and often it is hard to diagnose quickly the reason for the crash. Here are some steps you can take to try to fix the problem:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Troubleshooting_Editor_ crashes

? Cloned System disk to new Samsung SSD. PSE cannot be used

Before cloning PSE 12 I logged out. Adobe ID correct. PSE 12 listed. Starting PSE 12 request Log in, But this does not work. Giving E-Mail and Password results in never ending turning whel. No activation of product no error information.

Reinstall the software properly.
Download Photoshop Elements products | 13, 12, 11, 10
Mylenium

? Cloned System disk to new Samsung SSD. Before cloning PSE 12 I logged out. Adobe ID correct. PSE 12 listed.

? Cloned System disk to new Samsung SSD. Before cloning PSE 12 I logged out. Adobe ID correct. PSE 12 listed. Starting PSE 12 request Log in, But this does not work. Giving E-Mail and Password results in never ending turning whel. No activation of porduct no error information.

[discussion moved to Photoshop Elements forum]

Cloning Stamp in PSE 9

I've been using PS and PSE since 2003 so I'm not what you'd call a new PSE user. I upgraded to PSE9 a few years ago but now I can't get the clone stamp to work correctly. I keep getting black spots on the distracting elements that I want to remove. I've gone through Scott Kelby's PSE9 book a million times but still can't get the tool to work correctly. All I get are the black spots. Can anyone help me? I'm working on photo submissions and time is running out. Here's what I'm doing.
1) First I select the Clone Stamp tool and then the brush size I want to use (usually around size 45)
2) Then, I sample the area just to the left of the distracting element that I want to remove. (I use Alt + left click)
3) Then I run the tool over the distracting element and left click. But instead of getting my sampled area clone, I get a black spot.
I thought that maybe I was using too big of a brush but that's not the case. So, what the heck am I doing wrong or is there some kind of an update or tool that will allow me to remove distracting elements more easily?
Many thanks and my deepest appreciation to anyone who can help me!

The black spot should show you where you're moving, but change to cloned material once you're done. You can control that setting here (the overlapping gray rectangles):

PSE 6 Cloning and Help

I have had PSE 6 (used Photo Deluxe for years) for some time, but, only now wanting to use it to be a little creative. Problems I have when trying to clone parts of 2 pictures and then receive an error "Could not use the clone stamp tool because the area to clone has not been defined (Alt-click to define a source point)". I have tried that along with trying to reset Ctrl-Alt-Shift and repairing the install, and nothing works. Also the Help F1 key does not work. I searched Adobe site for assistance but cannot find solution; any assistance would be appreciated.

Here's an entirely different approach, using the Gradient tool and a clipping group.
In this example I positioned 2 pictures with an overlap where the blend will occur. For purposes of the example I temporarily shifted the top picture so you can see the amount of overlap:
Add a blank layer between the pictures and group the top two layers, creating the clipping group.
Set the Gradient tool options: Linear Gradient, Foreground-to-Transparent, Normal Mode, Opacity 100%, Transparency box checked.
Draw the gradient straight down within the overlap area. The length of the drawn line determines the amount of blending.
Important: be sure to draw within the overlap or else the picture edges will show through.

Bugs I've Encountered In PSE 7

Here are all the reproducible bugs I’ve encountered in PSE 7. Problems added since my last posting are marked [N]. In the coming weeks, I’ll evaluate PSE 8 to see how many of these have been fixed.
I’ve 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 that’s 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 1.9 GHz processor, 4 GB of memory, and a 7200 RPM disk (the same speed as desktop disks).
File Management and Tagging
Major Problems
[N] The conversion of a catalog from PSE 6 to PSE 7 doesn’t properly handle photos that are stored within the PSE 6 catalog folder (as occurs when PSE 6 was used to restore a catalog from a backup). As a result, it isn’t possible to save photos in version sets, and PSE 7 will create duplicate thumbnails in the Organizer for an edited file.
File > Backup/Restore Catalog doesn’t backup and restore audio in slide shows.
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.
When converting a previous-version catalog whose photos are stored inside the catalog folder, as occurs when you’ve 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 isn’t enough disk space to do the copy, the conversion will fail instantly with a generic non-explanatory error message.
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.
I’m very disappointed that Adobe didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 haven’t 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\”.
Minor Problems
In File > Export, the Common Basename can no longer be empty, and a hyphen is added automatically, so you can no longer get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.
You can get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. but you can’t get files named p1.jpg, p2.jpg, etc. – a hyphen is still added in that case.
Setting the Apply Metadata > Author or Copyright fields or the option Preserve Current Filename In XMP of the advanced options of the Photo Downloader causes duplicate files to be downloaded and imported.
Integration with Photoshop.com
Major problems
[N] Photoshop.com shows an incorrect date/time taken for photos with unknown month, day, or time.
For photos taken in years prior to 1970, the date/time shows as 12/31/1969 08:00 AM. For photos with year taken 1970 or later, the date/time shows as the the first month/day/minute/second in that time period in UTC that then gets converted to local time; e.g. “7/2/2005” gets shown as “7/1/2005 5:00 PM” for a user in PDT.
[N] Photoshop.com doesn’t obey the EXIF Orientation metadata field and can show photos rotated incorrectly, e.g. if they were rotated with the PSE option Edit > Preferences > Files > Rotate JPEGs/TIFFs Using Orientation Metadata.
Changes to the order of photos in a PSE album aren’t synced to Photoshop.com, and vice versa.
Adding a photo to a second synced album will cause Photoshop.com to lose any changes you’ve made with PSE’s Edit > Adjust Date And Time.
If you you rename a file that’s synced with Photoshop.com, Photoshop.com doesn’t pick up the new name (important if you’re using Photoshop.com as a backup service).
Only the top photo in a version set is synced with Photoshop.com (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup version sets).
When a stack is synced with Photoshop.com, all the photos in the stack are synced, but the fact that they were in a stack is lost (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup stacks).
Map View
Major Problems
Map view is unusably slow with more than about 6-8,000 mapped photos.
When I tested PSE 7 by importing 12,000 photos (the size of my catalog) that had GPS locations, the red push-pins didn’t blink uncontrollably as they did in PSE 6. But the Organizer crashed a number of times when I tried to zoom and pan the Map view until I was able to scroll the map to another country and then back again. The CPU continued to consume 80% of a single CPU (40% of two), even 10 minutes after I closed Map view. When I selected Limit Search to Map Area, PSE took over a minute to respond.
It takes 5 seconds to assign a keyword tag to a photo if there are 1,000 or more photos with map locations.
In PSE 7, it takes 3 seconds with 1,000 photos, 12 seconds with 8,000 photos, and 18 seconds with 12,000 photos.
Giving a map location to a tag assigned to hundreds of photos makes both the Keywords pane and the Map view unusably slow.
Giving a map location to a tag assigned to 2000 photos makes assigning any keyword tag to a photo very slow (see above). Searching on keyword tags takes 15 seconds, and a Show All takes 15 seconds.
Removing the map push-pin of a tag assigned to hundreds of photos mistakenly tries to update the metadata of each photo, which can take tens of minutes and fill up your recycle bin.
The weird thing is that assigning a map location to the tag doesn’t try to write the metadata of files with that tag.
Moving map locations always fails, silently (too bad if you want to record backcountry locations not namable via a place name).
If a photo with GPS coordinates is imported, it doesn’t show as a red push-pin on the map.
Scrolling the map or restarting the Organizer causes the pin to appear.
Color Management
Major Problems
The Organizer considers photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB as untagged with a color profile, showing their colors incorrectly.
Metadata
Major Problems
When setting the Organizer’s date/time for imported photos containing EXIF:DateTimeOriginal but not XMP:DateTimeOriginal, PSE 7 doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time in years prior to 2007.
Edit > Adjust Date and Time doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time when setting date/times many decades ago, e.g. October 5, 1961 12:00 PM.
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.
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.
The File > Write Keyword Tag command doesn’t create or update .XMP sidecars for Nikon D300 or D80 .NEF raw files (but it does for Canon CR2 raw files).
New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost.
See http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Date/times_of_files for details and workarounds.
[N] Edit > Adjust Date and Time > Shift To New Starting Date And Time and > Shift By Set Number Of Hours writes the time in UTC rather than local time, as required by the standard, causing other tools to show the wrong date/time.
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).
File > Write Keyword Tags doesn’t write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos.
[N] The Organizer ignores correctly formatted EXIF GPS locations in some files that many other programs can read without trouble; this may be because the EXIF is encoded in little-endian byte order.
Minor Problems
[N] Deselecting the option Use “Last Modified” Date If EXIF Date Is Not Found does not work – the last-modified date is always used for an imported file that doesn’t contain an EXIF date.
The Properties – Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the month, day, or time is unknown.
Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time “unknown” decrements the date by one day.
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.
With the Import EXIF Caption option turned off, captions pre-existing in a file’s EXIF:ImageDescription metadata field reappear in the Organizer after invoking the Full Editor.
Searching
Major Problems
The timeline doesn’t correctly display date ranges spanning many years.
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.
The User Guide gives two examples of how to use category exclusion that just don’t 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.
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”.
[N] Searching with the Find Bar for “1 star and lower” doesn’t show photos with 0 stars.
Find > By Details > Rating Is Lower Than 1 Star does work.
Searching for “0 stars only” doesn’t work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5.
Searching with date ranges doesn’t properly handle time “unknown”.
Minor Problems
The Show All button sometimes doesn’t appear if you quickly type a query into the Search text box and hit Enter.
Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range.
Show All doesn’t clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing).
Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isn’t available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been.
When searching, you can exclude a keyword tag and then include an album, but you can’t do it in the other order.
User Interface
Major Problems
On 1024x768 displays, and sometimes at higher resolutions, the Editor Print window is positioned to perfectly obscure the scroll bar of the drop-down list of printer profiles, leading people to think their printer’s profiles aren’t available.
This bug occurred with higher-resolution displays in PSE 6.
The menu bars don’t display if you have changed the screen DPI to be larger than 96 (as many people do on today’s ubiquitous high-res displays).
There is a workaround for both PSE 6 and 7. Set the option > Edit > Preferences > General > Use System Font. The result isn’t that pretty, since some of the application text will be large and some will be small, but it’s functional, and you’ll still be able to use the higher DPI with all your other applications.
Minor Problems
In the Properties window of Full Screen mode, if you click in the Notes field and do Ctrl-A to select all the text, then click in the Caption field and do Ctrl-A to select its text, the notes remain highlighted.
In the Organizer, Help > System Info reports the wrong amount for “Built-in Memory” on computers with more than 2GB of installed memory. (The command reports the correct amount in the Editor.)
The setting of View > Show Borders Around Thumbnails isn’t remembered after you restart PSE.
Copying a paragraph from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the Notes field of a keyword tag causes some of the spaces between words to be deleted.
Ctrl-A to select all text doesn’t work in the text fields of the Properties window.
Interestingly, you can use ctrl-A in the text fields of the full-screen mode Properties window.
In the full Editor, if at least one open photo is minimized to the Project Bin, Ctrl-Tab no longer cycles through the open windows.
Dialogs in the Editor sometimes bounce back when you try to move them.
Dates are shown by Display > Import Batch as 2\20\2008 rather than 2/20/2008.
In Create > Slide Show > Slide Show Preferences dialog, you can't use backspace or delete to clear the text in the Static and Transition Duration fields -- you need to select the text and then type over the selection (non-standard Windows behavior).
Escape doesn’t close the full-screen-mode Properties dialog.
You can’t use the Windows Explorer Tile command to tile the PSE Organizer and Editor windows.
The Editor window can’t be resized the standard Windows way by grabbing any edge, just the lower-right corner.
Alt doesn’t underline the shortcut letters of top-level menu items in the Full Editor (but it does in the Organizer).
The width of the Editor's Palette Bin can't be adjusted by dragging the left edge, as you can with all the other similar panes (Project Bin, Organizer Bin, Map View).
Slide Shows
Major Problems
The duration of a video clip included in a Slide Show is set to the default duration, not the length of the video clip, and right-click Edit Duration doesn’t change the clip’s duration.
For video clips, PSE 7 doesn’t enable the command to change the duration as it does for photos. But you can work around this by using Add Media > Photos And Videos From Folder to add the clip to the show.
An audio caption attached to a photo isn’t imported into a slide show even though the option Include Audio Captions as Narration is selected.
Editor
Minor Problems
[N] The Editor crashes if you invoke Quick Fix and use just one Touch Up tool (e.g. Whiten Teeth) and then save the file (but your changes are correctly saved).
The File > Save For Web command doesn’t remember the last settings (e.g. file format and quality) after your restart the Editor.
For a workaround, see http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Allow_Save_For.

Just kidding. But, are you going to give us a bug comparison between 7 and 8 ? I will probably sit version 8 out and get 9 next year. Thanks for the list!
Juergen

PSE 7 Problems Fixed in PSE 8

Since PSE 6 was released, I’ve tracked all the reproducible bugs I’ve encountered and reported to Adobe. I’ve tested these problems in PSE 8 and listed the results below – problems that appear to have been fixed in PSE 8 are marked [F], and problems that remain unfixed are marked [U].
Overview
There’s good and bad news. Adobe has fixed a number of serious bugs in the Organizer, but it has left most unfixed, even though they’ve been present since at least version 6. Even worse, the two major features introduced in the PSE 8 Organizer, face tagging and the keyword-tags text box, have show-stopper problems. And even worse yet, Full Screen view is now painfully slow with large catalogs.
The most important fixes address serious problems with PSE’s handling of drives that were introduced in version 6. PSE now notices when a drive’s letter has changed, a problem that has bedeviled many users upgrading or rearranging their drives. Also, PSE now ignores the case of UNC pathnames (network drives), no longer creating duplicate volumes for the same network drive. Unfortunately, one serious bug remains: PSE still gets horribly confused when there are two drives with the same volume serial number, and it still doesn’t even issue a warning.
But many long-standing problem areas remain: The Map View is an unusable toy. The handling of metadata is riddled with bugs. Folder Location view shows the wrong contents of folders. Searching has numerous bugs making it clumsy and confusing.
Overall, of all the bugs I’ve reported, PSE 8 fixes 8 of 46 major ones and 8 of 28 minor ones:
Major
Minor
Fixed
Unfixed
Fixed
Unfixed
File Management and Tagging
4
6
2
Integration with Photoshop.com
2
5
Map View
6
Color Management
1
Metadata
10
2
3
Searching
8
5
User Interface
1
1
5
9
Slide Shows
1
1
Editor
1
1
Total
8
38
8
20
I’ve 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 that’s 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 1.9 GHz processor, 4 GB of memory, and a 7200 RPM disk (the same speed as desktop disks).
New Problems in PSE 8
[U] PSE 8 crashes or gets intolerably slow after using the new Keyword Tags text box a small number of times.
On my 4 GB Vista 32 system, PSE crashes after tagging 41 photos.
[U] If you use the new Keyword Tags text box to apply an existing tag name with a comma in it, PSE will silently create two new tags instead.
Apply the existing tag “San Francisco, CA” will create two new tags, “San Francisco” and “CA”.
[U] After applying a tag, the Keyword Tags text box loses keyboard focus and you need to mouse-click in the box again to enter another tag.
Forcing the use of the mouse defeats the purpose of the Keyword Tags text box, which is to make tagging much faster.
[U] The Find > Find People For Tagging command locks up the Organizer for about 30 seconds after you click Done (even if you haven’t made any changes), when using larger catalogs.
On a catalog with 10,000 thumbnails showing, the cursor spins for 30 seconds after clicking done. But you can work around this by doing a tag search or setting a date range to have only a small number of thumbnails showing before you invoke the command.
[U] In the Find > Find People For Tagging command, when you select Add Missing Person, you usually can’t resize the selection box by grabbing the lower-right or lower-center handles, which are the handles that most right-handed people are likely to use.
If you move the mouse very quickly so that it is over the photo before the selection box appears, you can usually resize the box with those handles. But you have to be very quick.
[U] The Find > Find People For Tagging command doesn’t do auto-complete on pre-existing People tags, making it very hard to use with existing catalogs.
I have over two hundred People tags in my catalog. Because the command doesn’t auto-complete on pre-exisiting People tags and will silently create new tags, and because I don’t remember exact spellings (that’s the point of auto-complete!), I found myself creating duplicate tags (e.g. “John Ellis” instead of “John R. Ellis”, “Bob Smith” instead of “Robert Smith”). It’s painful to clean up such a mess.
[U] Full Screen view (F11) is much slower than in PSE 7 on larger catalogs.
With a 14,000-file catalog and all thumbnails visible, PSE 7 takes 6 seconds to invoke F11, while PSE 8 takes 13 seconds. With just 20 thumbnails visible (e.g. when working on the most recent import batch), PSE 7 takes 1 second, while PSE 8 takes 7 seconds. This makes selecting the good and weeding out the bad significantly slower.
[U] PSE doesn’t remember the settings if you toggle the Full-Screen Quick Edit Panel and Quick Organize Panel to disappear completely.
On 4:3 displays, it’s desirable to hide the panels completely in full-screen view, so you see the entire image without the panels overlapping them (that’s the point of full-screen view, no?). But PSE forgets the toggle settings, even in the same session.
[U] The keyword tagging in the Quick Organize Panel doesn’t auto-complete tags you type, making it useless with more than a dozen or so tags.
It’s worse than useless, since it will silently create a new tag if you mistype the name of an existing one. And the “tag cloud” is a silly toy that doesn’t help with hundreds of tags.
File Management and Tagging
Major Problems
[F] 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.
[F] 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.
[F] 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 had the same underlying cause – the Organizer didn’t update drive letters in its catalog. Fixed in PSE 8.
[F] 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\”.
[U] 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 haven’t been easy to reproduce.
[U] 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.
I remain mystified that Adobe didn’t 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 (and a lot of people using cloning utilities).
[U] The conversion of a catalog from PSE 6 to PSE 8 doesn’t properly handle photos that are stored within the PSE 6 catalog folder (as occurs when PSE 6 was used to restore a catalog from a backup). As a result, it isn’t possible to save photos in version sets, and PSE 8 will create duplicate thumbnails in the Organizer for an edited file.
[U] File > Backup/Restore Catalog doesn’t backup and restore audio in slide shows.
[U] 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.
[U] When converting a previous-version catalog whose photos are stored inside the catalog folder, as occurs when you’ve previously used File > Restore Catalog with New Location, PSE 8 needlessly copies all those photos. If you have a very large catalog, this will waste huge amounts of disk space; and if there isn’t enough disk space to do the copy, the conversion will fail instantly with a generic non-explanatory error message.
Minor Problems
[U] In File > Export, the Common Basename can no longer be empty, and a hyphen is added automatically, so you can no longer get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.
You can get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. but you can’t get files named p1.jpg, p2.jpg, etc. – a hyphen is still added in that case.
[U] Setting the Apply Metadata > Author or Copyright fields or the option Preserve Current Filename In XMP of the advanced options of the Photo Downloader causes duplicate files to be downloaded and imported.
Integration with Photoshop.com
Major problems
[F] Adding a photo to a second synced album will cause Photoshop.com to lose any changes you’ve made with PSE’s Edit > Adjust Date And Time.
[F] If you you rename a file that’s synced with Photoshop.com, Photoshop.com doesn’t pick up the new name (important if you’re using Photoshop.com as a backup service).
[U] Photoshop.com shows an incorrect date/time taken for photos with unknown month, day, or time.
The date/time shows as the the first month/day/minute/second in that time period in UTC that then gets converted to local time; e.g. “7/2/2005” gets shown as “7/1/2005 5:00 PM” for a user in PDT.
[U] Photoshop.com doesn’t obey the EXIF Orientation metadata field and can show photos rotated incorrectly, e.g. if they were rotated with the PSE option Edit > Preferences > Files > Rotate JPEGs/TIFFs Using Orientation Metadata.
[U] Changes to the order of photos in a PSE album aren’t synced to Photoshop.com, and vice versa.
[U] Only the top photo in a version set is synced with Photoshop.com (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup version sets).
[U] When a stack is synced with Photoshop.com, all the photos in the stack are synced, but the fact that they were in a stack is lost (so you can’t rely on Photoshop.com to backup stacks).
Map View
Major Problems
[U] It takes 4 seconds to assign a keyword tag to a photo if there are 2,000 or more photos with map locations.
It takes 2 seconds with 1,000 photos, 6 seconds with 4000 photos, and 11 seconds with 8,000 photos, and 21 seconds with 12,000 photos.
[U] Map view is unusably slow with more than 8 - 10,000 mapped photos.
When I imported 12,000 photos (the size of my catalog) that had GPS locations, the Organizer crashed a number of times when I tried to zoom and pan the Map view. When I selected Limit Search to Map Area, PSE took over a minute to respond.
[U] Giving a map location to a tag assigned to hundreds of photos makes both the Keywords pane and the Map view unusably slow.
Giving a map location to a tag assigned to 1700 photos makes assigning any keyword tag to a photo very slow, 12 seconds. Searching on keyword tags and Show All each take 13 seconds.
[U] Removing the map push-pin of a tag assigned to hundreds of photos mistakenly tries to update the metadata of each photo, which can take tens of minutes and fill up your recycle bin.
The weird thing is that assigning a map location to the tag doesn’t try to write the metadata of files with that tag.
[U] Moving map locations always fails, silently (too bad if you want to record backcountry locations not namable via a place name).
[U] If a photo with GPS coordinates is imported, it doesn’t show as a red push-pin on the map.
Scrolling the map or restarting the Organizer causes the pin to appear.
Color Management
Major Problems
[U] The Organizer considers photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB as untagged with a color profile, showing their colors incorrectly.
Metadata
Major Problems
[U] The File > Write Keyword Tag command doesn’t create or update .XMP sidecars for Nikon D300 or D80 .NEF raw files (but it does for Canon CR2 raw files).
The PSE 8 Write Keyword Tag command now gives a warning when you try to invoke it on a D300 .NEF raw file. Why PSE can write sidecars for Canon but not Nikon raw files is a mystery – it’s no harder to handle one than the other.
[U] 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).
[U] File > Write Keyword Tags doesn’t write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos.
[U] The Organizer ignores correctly formatted EXIF GPS locations in some files that many other programs can read without trouble; this may be because the EXIF is encoded in little-endian byte order.
[U] New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost.
See http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Date/times_of_files for details and workarounds.
[U] Edit > Adjust Date and Time > Shift To New Starting Date And Time and > Shift By Set Number Of Hours writes the time in UTC rather than local time, as required by the standard, causing other tools to show the wrong date/time.
[U] 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.
[U] 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.
[U] Edit > Adjust Date and Time doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time when setting date/times many decades ago, e.g. October 5, 1961 12:00 PM.
[U] When setting the Organizer’s date/time for imported photos containing EXIF:DateTimeOriginal but not XMP:DateTimeOriginal, PSE 7 doesn’t properly handle US Daylight Savings Time in years prior to 2007, e.g. October 31, 2006 12:00 PM.
Minor Problems
[F] The Properties – Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the month, day, or time is unknown.
[F] 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.
Now, the edited version picks up date/time, caption, notes, and keyword tags, but not the star rating, which could be charitably interpreted as a plausible design decision.
[U] Deselecting the option Use “Last Modified” Date If EXIF Date Is Not Found does not work – the last-modified date is always used for an imported file that doesn’t contain an EXIF date.
[U] Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time “unknown” decrements the date by one day.
[U] With the Import EXIF Caption option turned off, captions pre-existing in a file’s EXIF:ImageDescription metadata field reappear in the Organizer after invoking the Full Editor.
Searching
Major Problems
[U] The timeline doesn’t correctly display date ranges spanning many years.
[U] 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.
The User Guide gives two examples of how to use category exclusion that just don’t work in PSE 6, 7, or 8. 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. You can also use the text query “not tag:<category tag>”, .e.g. “not tag:places”, but this will exclude all tags containing “places” as part of their name – there is no way to get an exact match of a tag name.
[U] Find > By History > Imported On sorts the photo dates alphabetically, rather than by date/time.
When the results first display, they are now sorted by Imported From then (correctly) by Date/Time. However, if you click on the Date/Time column header to sort by that column, the dates are sorted alphabetically (incorrectly).
[U] Find > By History > Imported On takes a couple of minutes on a large catalog, making the command almost useless.
[U] Find > By History > Imported On shows a scary message “Deleting Keyword Tags” that is apparently harmless.
[U] Searching with the Find Bar for “1 star and lower” doesn’t show photos with 0 stars.
Find > By Details > Rating Is Lower Than 1 Star does work.
[U] Searching for “0 stars only” doesn’t work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5.
[U] Searching with date ranges doesn’t properly handle time “unknown”.
Minor Problems
[U] The Show All button sometimes doesn’t appear if you quickly type a query into the Search text box and hit Enter.
[U] Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range.
[U] Show All doesn’t clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing).
[U] Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isn’t available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been.
[U] When searching, you can exclude a keyword tag and then include an album, but you can’t do it in the other order.
User Interface
Major Problems
[?] On 1024x768 displays, and sometimes at higher resolutions, the Editor Print window is positioned to perfectly obscure the scroll bar of the drop-down list of printer profiles, leading people to think their printer’s profiles aren’t available.
I can’t reproduce this in PSE 8. The Editor’s Print dialog is all rearranged. But this bug struck some people and not others, so it may be still lurking.
[U] The menu bars don’t display if you have changed the screen DPI to be larger than 96 (as many people do on today’s ubiquitous high-res displays).
Adobe should be embarrassed about this, given that more and more computers are shipping preconfigured with higher DPIs. See http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#The_Organizers_Menu_Bar_ doesnt_show for a workaround.
Minor Problems
[F] Copying a paragraph from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the Notes field of a keyword tag causes some of the spaces between words to be deleted.
[F] In the full Editor, if at least one open photo is minimized to the Project Bin, Ctrl-Tab no longer cycles through the open windows.
[F] The Editor window can’t be resized the standard Windows way by grabbing any edge, just the lower-right corner.
Well, almost – you can grab the left, right, and bottom edges but not the top.
[F] Alt doesn’t underline the shortcut letters of top-level menu items in the Full Editor (but it does in the Organizer).
Both the Editor and Organizer don’t show the underline until you let up on the Alt key, whereas other Windows program show the underline when you first press the Alt key.
[F] The width of the Editor's Palette Bin can't be adjusted by dragging the left edge, as you can with all the other similar panes (Project Bin, Organizer Bin, Map View).
[U] In the Properties window of Full Screen mode, if you click in the Notes field and do Ctrl-A to select all the text, then click in the Caption field and do Ctrl-A to select its text, the notes remain highlighted.
[U] In the Organizer, Help > System Info reports the wrong amount for “Built-in Memory” on computers with more than 2GB of installed memory. (The command reports the correct amount in the Editor.)
[U] The setting of View > Show Borders Around Thumbnails isn’t remembered after you restart PSE.
[U] Ctrl-A to select all text doesn’t work in the text fields of the Properties window.
Interestingly, you can use ctrl-A in the text fields of the full-screen mode Properties window.
[U] Dialogs in the Editor sometimes bounce back when you try to move them.
[U] Dates are shown by Display > Import Batch as 2\20\2008 rather than 2/20/2008.
[U] In Create > Slide Show > Slide Show Preferences dialog, you can't use backspace or delete to clear the text in the Static and Transition Duration fields -- you need to select the text and then type over the selection (non-standard Windows behavior).
[U] Escape doesn’t close the full-screen-mode Properties dialog.
[U] You can’t use the Windows Explorer Tile command to tile the PSE Organizer and Editor windows.
The Editor can now be tiled by Windows Explorer and other window managers, but the Organizer still can’t.
Slide Shows
Major Problems
[F] The duration of a video clip included in a Slide Show is set to the default duration, not the length of the video clip, and right-click Edit Duration doesn’t change the clip’s duration.
PSE now sets the duration to the length of the clip. You can’t edit the duration, though – you can invoke Edit Duration, but PSE ignores the new value.
[U] An audio caption attached to a photo isn’t imported into a slide show even though the option Include Audio Captions as Narration is selected.
For an individual slide, you can give the Use Existing Audio Caption command to import that photo’s existing audio caption.
Editor
Minor Problems
[F] The Editor crashes if you invoke Quick Fix and use just one Touch Up tool (e.g. Whiten Teeth) and then save the file (but your changes are correctly saved).
[U] The File > Save For Web command doesn’t remember the last settings (e.g. file format and quality) after your restart the Editor.
For a workaround, see http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Allow_Save_For.

John,
Firstly, my apologies for the length of this post – it has been fermenting a while. For those in a hurry I have split it into two sections – the first contains some general comments on the situation with PSE (v 7 in my case) and Adobe (as I see it) and the second contains a list of issues that I have encountered and some suggestions for improvement. As with you, my comments are largely directed at the Organiser module within PSE.
Part 1:
Before going any further I’d like to say what an excellent job you’ve done in cataloguing, understanding and in many cases providing solutions to a number of bugs. Adobe should be paying you a hefty sum for doing this work. It’s a welcome change from a large percentage of what you read in blogs and forums to see things dealt with systematically, objectively and in an informed way.
I’m less impressed with Adobe’s approach. In my opinion, if you choose not to provide program updates to your customers (i.e. you get what you bought in the box and that’s it) then you have a moral obligation to make sure that what you sell is as robust and free of bugs as possible.
I would be very surprised if they were not well aware of the comments you have made (if they aren’t then that would indicate an appalling failure of their ability to process feedback). The fact that they have not, in subsequent releases, dealt with all of the issues that have been highlighted is not good. I would go further and suggest that it is actually a breach of fair trading practice and disingenuous to sell the product as “fit for purpose” knowing these bugs are still in place.
It’s unreasonable to expect software to be absolutely faultless, and this is why the issuing of updates is a much “fairer” system. The problem, I think, with Adobe’s approach is that to entice new customers to each release they need to provide new features. A natural consequence of this is that there is a temptation to prioritise development of new features rather than providing solutions to existing issues. There is no incentive for Adobe to change this state of affairs for as long as customers are purchasing their products. In this respect one of the problems is that many of the reviewers to whom prospective customers go will rely on first impressions and will not uncover many of the issues. Adobe may be comfortable with this situation (and on relying on the reflected aura of Photoshop) but their product is not cheap and there is plenty of scope for competitors to provide a more robust, dependable product at cheaper price. With free applications like Picasa they will need to be very careful they don’t drop the ball.
Don’t get me wrong I think the concept of PSE organiser is excellent (I actually prefer it to my experience of Lightroom), it is the quality of execution that I have issues with.
My first experience of PSE was version 3 and this was positive enough for me to purchase PSE 7. However, my biggest disappointment with PSE 7, because to me it is fundamental, has been the quality of rendering images in full screen mode. Yours is the first comment I have seen that comments on the appearance of “jaggies” when displaying images in PSE. My understanding is that this relates to the anti-aliasing which is carried out when converting from image to display resolution and the level to which this smoothes out gradients in hue, saturation and luminance. I never observed this problem is PSE 3. Although the degree of anti-aliasing is a subjective preference, I was deeply disappointed and still find it hard to believe that free or bundled software (picture manager, windows picture viewer, etc) can manage this when PSE 7 can’t.
Anyway, I’m not sure how to illicit a change from Adobe. One way is to write the sort of rant I have above although I doubt this will make much difference. In any case keep up the good work and hopefully something will come of it.
Part 2:
Some issues I’ve encountered:
Migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 – change in directory structure means that the “documents and settings” part of the user directory path in XP (i.e. c:\documents and settings\<<username>>\etc.) is now a shortcut which redirects you to the new location for user files which is c:\users\<<username>> \etc. If you are migrating from an old XP machine to a new Windows 7 one, you’ve kept your username the same and you have tried to retain the same directory structure then PSE 7 will still find files in your catalogue with the old style path. However, it will not recognise duplicates if you accidentally re-import the same files now they are on your Windows 7 machine. My workaround for this is to use an external file manager (e.g. windows explorer) to change the name of the directory that contains all of your photos. This causes PSE 7 to fail to resolve the path locations. You can then can select the relevant files and reconnect using the reconnect facility (File-Reconnect-Missing Files);
Watched folders are lost for any drive other than C when PSE 7 is closed and then reopened;
Duplicate files are not recognised and can be imported if they are not on the C drive (i.e. on an external drive);
Selecting a category selects all of the keyword tags/subcategories beneath it but excluding it does not exclude all of the keyword tags/subcategories beneath it; however, both selecting and excluding a sub-category selects and excludes the tags/sub categories beneath it;
Searches bring back the entire version set or stack even if only one of the files within meets the search criteria;
The instant search facility will sometimes decide that a number typed in is a date and will not find some files you would expect it to e.g. those where the number typed in is part of the filename rather than a date;
Anti-aliasing is insufficient – jaggies appear on jpegs displayed at certain zoom level. Interestingly this does not seem to occur if a jpeg has been created from a raw file through PSE 7 rather than an external application (at least for the camera I have).
Some suggestions:
Find duplicates facility;
Sort by filename and other file data;
Hide directories in the folder directory pane of the folder view if they contain no imported files – in PSE3 this was the only option and was actually quite useful to confirm that there were no imported files in a certain location (e.g. if e:\...etc was not in the list then you knew that you had no imported files located on the e:\ drive). It would be good to have this a display option.
Allow filters to be applied only to selected files;
Allow files to be rotated in the organiser without actually resaving them as a rotated file.

PSE 8 (for Mac) refuses to launch - with message

Just tried to launch PSE 8 (for Mac), it didn't launch, but produced the message: "Could not open scratch file because disk is not available."
(tried this four times with the same result each time)
Conclusion: because the most recent backup to RAID filled that disk, PSE 8 cannot access the scratch disk on the RAID backup disk.
(This, even though I removed over 80 GB of old video files from the archive.)
I purchased PSE 8 11/28/2009 - can I use an app removal utility to remove this installed version and re-download another installer? It seems the most direct approach but first I have to ensure I can download a "replacement" and find out the original serial number to activate that replacement.
The original directions from Adobe indicate that all I have to do is access my order history and the serial number will be on the order form. I'm not seeing any clearly identified serial number on that order.
So my question are;
1. Should I first remove the original PSE 8 - or just the plists?
2. how to find the original serial number?
I do know already: once I have PSE 8 replacement installation running, I must set a scratch disk location on another (roomier) drive. this is not a problem: I have two 1 TB drives installed in my Mac Pro in addition to the two 500 GB drives which make up the (old) RAID.
Mac Pro 1,1 (2.66 Ghz Quad Core Xeon), OS 10.5.8

Good call but it didn't work: tried deleting those plists twice. Still get "disk not available" message w/ immediate PSE quit.
Further: I ran Diskwarrior on my "home" drive, the cloned "home" drive AND the RAID backup.
This included Directory repair, File Check and Hardware Check on all three volumes.
Also repaired permissions on "home" drive and cloned drive.
I then repeated the attempt to launch PSE 8 on my "home" drive and the cloned "home" drive: same result. (failure)
Sidebar: While running Disk Utility to repair permissions, I happened to click on the "RAID" button and found that
one drive is listed as "Failed" and the other is listed as "Degraded."
Just in case that has anything to do with the PSE 8 failure to launch: I am now using Disk Utility to rebuild that RAID set. This takes 4 hours and will wipe it clean. I'll try in the morning once again to launch PSE 8 and get back with result.

PSE 6 Problems Fixed in PSE 7

Over the past year, Ive kept a list of PSE 6 problems Ive encountered and verified:
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b65e1b/0
Ive tested those problems in PSE 7 on my computer, and the results appear below.
PSE 6 problems that appear to have been fixed in PSE 7 are marked [F], and problems that arent fixed are marked [NF]. Because of limitations of the forum, this list is split across several messages.
Overview
The good news is that Adobe has fixed many of the most serious problems with PSE 6:
- The missing Help content.
- The inability to use raw files on a newer computer.
- The Move command that deleted files.
- The low-contrast grey-on-black user interface.
In addition, the PSE 7 Organizer seems significantly zippier for scrolling and searching (with my 13K catalog and someone elses 68K catalog).
The not-so-good news is that a fair number of serious problems and a large number of minor ones remain unfixed:
- The Organizer still gets horribly confused by reassignment of drive letters and drives with duplicate serial numbers, situations that occur when people upgrade their computers.
- Numerous problems with searching, including the broken timeline and exclude keyword category.
- Folder Location view still shows incorrect folder contents.
- Map view remains a buggy toy that cant handle more than several hundred photos.
- Date/times set by Adjust Date and Time can still be lost silently.
- High-resolution displays with DPIs larger than 96 arent supported.
- The Organizer shows incorrect colors for Adobe RGB photos.
There are 65 issues listed here, 37 of which are major, causing data loss or seriously impeding functionality with no easy, obvious workaround. Of the 37 major issues, 13 have been fixed. Of the 28 minor issues, 8 have been fixed.
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 PSE 6 Editor has far fewer problems 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 laptop with a dual-core 1.8 GHz processor, 3 GB of memory, and a 7200 RPM disk (the same speed as desktop disks).
Raw Files
Major Problems
[F] On a multiprocessor, the Organizer behaves erratically with catalogs containing raw files: sometimes it crashes, sometimes it shows the hourglass icon for raw files, sometimes it shows the broken-image icon.
[F] In a catalog with large numbers of raw files, scrolling quickly over dozens or hundreds of large-sized thumbnails will consume 100% CPU for a minute or longer.

Part II
File Management and Tagging
Major Problems
[F] The File > Move command will silently and permanently lose a file if the destination folder has a file of the same name as the file being moved; this is different behavior than PSE 5.
[F] The File > Move command loses the association between the photo and the audio caption, even though it moves both files to the new location.
[F] If you move or rename a catalog using File > Catalog > Move/Rename, you can no longer edit existing slideshows in the catalog.
[F] Tag hierarchies with more than 500 or so tags make the Keywords pane unusably slow (but worked fine in PSE 5).
[F] The Photo Downloader process APDProxy.exe crashes at startup because of a missing DLL.
]This problem doesnt occur in my PSE 7. But it was clearly a timing-dependent bug (a race condition) that came and went for me and many others, so it may be still lurking. Adobe has a tech note that says it occurs with PSE 7, but the tech note gives symptoms and a workaround that only apply to PSE 6, suggesting a cut-and-paste error by a PSE 7 support person.
[NF] 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. Adobes tech note on the issue gives incorrect and misleading information about possible solutions.
[NF] 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.
[NF] 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.
[NF] 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.
Minor Problems
[F] The File > Rename command no longer includes leading zeroes, causing the renamed files to sort incorrectly in Windows Explorer.
[F] Display > Import Batch shows the wrong time for batches imported by the Photo Downloader; if the local time zone is UTC-8:00, then the time will be 8 hours earlier.
[F] The Organizer doesnt unlock an edited file saved to a folder whose name contains an apostrophe.
[NF] In File > Export, the Common Basename can no longer be empty, and a hyphen is added automatically, so you can no longer get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.
]You can get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc. but you cant get files named p1.jpg, p2.jpg, etc. a hyphen is still added in that case.
[NF] Setting the Apply Metadata > Author or Copyright fields or the option Preserve Current Filename In XMP of the advanced options of the Photo Downloader causes duplicate files to be downloaded and imported.
Map View
Major Problems
[NF] Map view is unusably slow with more than about 6-8,000 mapped photos.
]When I tested PSE 7 by importing 12,000 photos (the size of my catalog) that had GPS locations, the red push-pins didnt blink uncontrollably as they did in PSE 6. But the Organizer crashed a number of times when I tried to zoom and pan the Map view until I was able to scroll the map to another country and then back again. The CPU continued to consume 80% of a single CPU (40% of two), even 10 minutes after I closed Map view. When I selected Limit Search to Map Area, PSE took over a minute to respond.
[NF] It takes 5 seconds to assign a keyword tag to a photo if there are 1,000 or more photos with map locations.
]In PSE 7, it takes 3 seconds with 1,000 photos, 12 seconds with 8,000 photos, and 18 seconds with 12,000 photos.
[NF] Giving a map location to a tag assigned to hundreds of photos makes both the Keywords pane and the Map view unusably slow.
]Giving a map location to a tag assigned to 2000 photos makes assigning any keyword tag to a photo very slow (see above). Searching on keyword tags takes 15 seconds, and a Show All takes 15 seconds.
[NF] Removing the map push-pin of a tag assigned to hundreds of photos mistakenly tries to update the metadata of each photo, which can take tens of minutes and fill up your recycle bin.
]The weird thing is that assigning a map location to the tag doesnt try to write the metadata of files with that tag.
[NF] Moving map locations always fails, silently (too bad if you want to record backcountry locations not namable via a place name).
[NF] If a photo with GPS coordinates is imported, it doesnt show as a red push-pin on the map.
]Scrolling the map or restarting the Organizer causes the pin to appear.

Bugs Ive Encountered In PSE 7

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\.

Part III Color Management Major Problems The Organizer considers photos produced by cameras set to the color space Adobe RGB as untagged with a color profile, showing their colors incorrectly. 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. Metadata Major Problems [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. [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. [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. [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. [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). New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost. ]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. 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. 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). File > Write Keyword Tags doesnt write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos. Minor Problems [N] The Properties Metadata window shows the wrong value for Date Time Original when the day is unknown. Edit > Adjust Date and Time applied to a file with time unknown decrements the date by one day. 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. 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. Searching Major Problems The timeline doesnt correctly display date ranges spanning many years. 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. ]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. 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. Searching for 0 stars only doesnt work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5. Searching with date ranges doesnt properly handle time unknown. Minor Problems [N] The Show All button sometimes doesnt appear if you quickly type a query into the Search text box and hit Enter. Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range. Show All doesnt clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing). Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isnt available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been. When searching, you can exclude a keyword tag and then include an album, but you cant do it in the other order.

How do you make a 4 x 4 picture from a 4 x 6 picture without distortion or cropping in PSE 8

I've got a 4x6 photo that I cannot trim any width off of, or I will lose members of the family from the picture. Is there any way in PSE 8 to make a 4x4 picture from a 4x6 without cropping or distorting the picture?
I'd appreciate any serious answers.

It really depends on what is at the top and bottom of the photo, If it can be cloned easily then you could resize the canvas and clone the top and bottom.
Before 6x4
After 4x4
Brian

PSE 12 organiser uses wrong folders

PSE 12 organiser doesn't remember photos after import from whatever source (for example, pics are imported from e:\test\pics, but the organiser shows them as imported from f:\test\pics), and this is trying to locate pictures (link again) with no success.
This even happens when everything is freshly installed, and pics are shown correctly - after saving the catalogue pictures cannot be found.
Any ideas?
Thank you

One typical situation when you may see the location in the catalog pointing to another drive letter (Windows) is if you are using different external drives or USB thumb drives. This is the reason why it is highly recommended to always assign the same letter drive to any external drive; it's best to start with letters like M, N, P, Q... rather than E, F, G, H... If you have assigned the letter E, then you have another drive plugged in, the last one will be assigned E, and if you plug-in the previous drive, Windows will recognize it as F.
The organizer saves the drive identification with both the drive letter and the drive serial number, but that does not always help to correctly identify the drive. For instance, if you have a cloned external drive, there are situations where two drives have the same serial number.
More on that topic:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/#_Writing_File_Metadata

How to Work in PSE 9 with LR edits on CD

I'm new to LR3. I chose to use it because it was an Adobe product and I already have PSE9. After reading the instructions for LR, there seems to be some capability between the two because on the menu I can elect to chose to edit in Photoshop Elements, I beleive, if I remember reading correctly. However, someone else in the forum who gave me good advice on another matter said that the files for LR and PSE9 were not really compatible. I made some edits in LR and burned them to a CD because I'm not confident enough to try to get the edits to PSE9 any other way. I don't want the files in LR and particularly PSE9 to be messed up. Should I even try to import the edits on the CD into PSE for cloning and cropping edits because I'm more familiar with PSE? Also looking on the filmstrip for LR it seems as if my edits took because my images look different. (I don't seem to see the original images though.)
I made virtual copies because for some images I made two or three versions of edits for comparison. Did my edits take on the CD? I read that when you export your LR edits they are saved. Then I read on another forum that to save LR image edits in the original file you have to go to Develop..Photot>Save>Metadata and .... But this has something to do with xmp files, which I don't know about.
Should I import the LR edits into LR? Also, the first time I installed LR, a lot of my PSE9 files appeared in LR. This is not what I wanted, but it's ok. Maybe I accidentally clicked the wrong button. No problem, though, the images I want to work on are in LR. If I have both PSE9 and LR3 installed on my computer.

Hi,
I use the following method:
1.       Open the project and disconnect from source control.
2.       Modify any files you need. Be aware that when you add/rename/remove/move files, the RoboHelp control files are modified too. (.apj and .fpj)
3.       When TFS is up, check out the files using team explorer. Do NOT overwrite local files. (Make a backup first.)
4.       Using TFS, check in all modified files. Do NOT check in the XPJ file. If you do, the project will lose its connection with source control.
5.       Thrash the local project.
6.       Get the latest version from the server.
Be aware that this requires that you know what you’re doing. Especially when control files are modified. When you only modify the content of existing topics and check the existing topic in, you should be fine.
Greet,
Willam

PSE 5.0 question

Have not used PSE much up to now (that's why I have 5.0). How do I remove a glare on the lens of glasses with out changing anything else in the pic. I need to edit just that spot. BTW... I'm in full edit mode. Thanks! Will have to upgrade ASAP.

First of all I made a copy of the Background layer and ran auto levels to correct the color and brightness.
To remove the glare I cheated at bit...I selected the good eye, feathered the selection a few pixels, and copy/pasted the selection to a new layer. Then I flipped the layer horizontally and used the Move tool with arrow keys to position this good eye over over the bad. To remove some remaining glare just below the top of the glasses rim I added a blank layer and cloned some of his skin to the left and right of this glare. Note that you can do the clone directly on the picture layer; the reason for the blank layer is that if you mess up the cloning you can delete this layer and start again. If you do use the blank layer, make sure to check the Use All Layers box on the options bar.
To remove the switchplate I did similar: selected a portion of the wallpaper to the left of the switchplate, feathered the selection, copy/pasted the selection to a new layer, and used the Move tool to align this over the switch, taking care to align the wallpaper pattern. Then I used the Eraser to remove the portion of this layer which covered Bill's face. Since the new portion of the wallpaper was slightly darker than the original I made a levels adjustment to this layer to lighten it to match the original as close as possible.
Here is the fullsize picture if you want it:
http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1Ad6y08YMbKgZSDNCLUAWD2p7WA5PC
Right-click to save it to your PC.

PSE 5.0 cloning ?

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