Re-connecting Elements 9 to a New Location

Question

I have copied all my images - around 500Gb - to a new (larger) external Hard Drive.  The transfer took about 16 hours.
Can anyone advise how I move/reconnect the Adobe Elements catalog to point to the new location?
The answer I'd not like to hear is that I need to re-copy these source media files through instructions within Elements 9. I can't believe it's  above a smart software developer's ability or insight to predict that would be a common occurrence for Elements users and to have made it an easy process to ‘re-point’ their product to the new content location.
Thanks
Charles

Answer 1

Charles,
You had already made things clear in your other posts.
As you say, you are starting with a very sophisticated tree organization, with deliberate file name duplications for instance, with a lot of external disks : I have never seen anything like this before... no I am wrong : its just a little more that what I did before starting to use Elements ten years ago
Now its obvious to me that I have given you too much info, too many links and that has not helped you to understand how to solve your problems. Most of your objections in your last post show that you have missed the answers already given.
Before applying the best methods to reconnect, there are facts you have to understand.
- any database organizing system (DAM) like the Organizer, Lightroom or more sophisticated ones, provide ways to insure easy retrieval and grouping of media, sorting and rating, keeping track of originals and versions. That's also your goal.
- you have created your own system (very similar to my own one, 10 years ago). The question is : do you consider it as the ultimate goal, or simply a means to achieve the above general goal ?
- You want to keep your own organization : it's quite possible to do so even if it is redundant, and totally opposed to any database system philosophy. For instance, you understand that your Organizer catalog only contains paths to your selectec working files and totally ignores others. The builtin tools to move, rename, delete or backup/restore ignore other files. You don't want to use them precisely because you want to control all files. All those database systems can solve the final organization goals : they can deal with hundred of thousands pictures, keeping track of originals as well as version sets, they nearly completely free you of the task of thinking about folders. You simply have to use them, and trust them.
- Do you really think that there is a market to develop such personal solutions ? As I said before it is possible to keep your organization together with the standard one, but that means only useless complexity. Even if the developers of Elements are not the smartest, they are working with the same choice as other elaborate systems like Lightroom : trust the software and understand and use it.
- "Buyers beware..." There, you are right. There are other kinds of tools, and it should be obvious that many users cannot accept to trust a software and stop thinking about folders : they are right in thinking the Organizer is not the right tool for them.
charlesjennings wrote:
I CAN'T BELIEVE that the PSE developers didn't forsee the following needs:
a. that users would want to move images from one disk to another at times as they ran out of space or upgraded
b. that users may not want PSE to manage ALL their images, but just a sub-set (the better ones, 'working' files etc.)
c. that Adobe hasn't produced either guidance or tools to make migration straightforward.
- You are also partly right here : the Organizer was first introduced at a time when using external disks was not common. But you are wrong in that : the way to change disk or upgrade hardware or software version has been widely covered (see my links and Adobe's help) and there are safe ways included, especially the backup and restore way, the moving files way and ways of reconnecting (even if those are not as powerful as in Lightroom). Then managing only a subset of pictures has never been a problem, except if you insist on your sophisticated tree arborescence with duplicate names.
Now, to solve your problem .:
First did you read and can you follow the instructions in the 2nd link (quickly reconnecting...) I gave you ?
There would be two other ways to do the job, but the fact that you have already reconnected some files might be a problem.
- First : simply do the standard migrating way in the Organizer : backup your catalog to one of your external disks, and simply restore to the custom location keeping the same tree organization on your new drive. That's time consuming, but simple and safe and there is no risk for your original master files : the catalogued files will be restored in the right subfolders, totally ignoring duplicate file names.
- The last resort... I won't give it here because it requires direct changes in the sqlite database contained in your catalog. I am sure that for one person that might help, I would cause severe troubles for dozens of others... I also think that if smart developers wanted to implement this catalog update following a drive change, they would meet many problems like yours because of seemingly identical situations hiding custom differences in personal organization.