This question involves Adobe Album Starter and Elements 8

Question

I have recently purchased Elements 8 and have started to transfer photos from Album Starter to Elements 8.
I was successful with some but there are a great many left with the little red icon in the middle bottom of them.
I am unable to do anything with them: copy, print, duplicate or anything.  The message reads that it is not able to connect.
How am I going to get my pictures released from Album Starter.  This has been an on going problem with Adobe. Please, please help
me retrieve my photos otherwise I will have to discontinue use of Elements 8 and ask for a refund.  These photos are important to
me.  Erma Platter

Answer 1

Just as I suspected.
To maybe help clarify, your photos are not "in" Starter Edition", so there is no way to "get them out of there".
Think of it this way:
Imagine your photos are books in a library. The books themselves are actually located on the shelves in the library. But, there's a section of the library with the Index Cards. One index card for every book, with the index cards all nicely organized in drawers so you can find the book your looking for without wandering around the whole library. Each index card has a description of the book, a picture of the book, and most importantly, information as to where the book is stored on the shelves so you can go find it.
So, the books are not "in" the Index Card Drawers.
Now, imagine that after all the index cards had been created, someone goes around the library and moves the books. Maybe, even throws some of them away.
Then, you go to the Index Drawer, find the "book" you are looking for, see that it is located on shelf G54-102, walk over to shelf G54-102, but the book isn't there, because someone moved it without telling the person who maintains the Index Cards.
That book is Disconnected from the Index Card.
Now, let's bring that analogy back to Starter Edition (and Elements)
The Books are your photos
The Shelves are your Hard Disk
The Index Card Drawer is Starter Edition (or Elements)
The Index Cards are the presentation of your photos in Starter Edition (or Elements)
So, just as the Books are not in the Index Card Drawers, your Photos are not in Starter Edition.
What is "in" Starter Edition is simply information about your photo. A small thumbnail (which is what you see in Starter Edition) and most importantly, a reference to where on your hard drive the photo is actually stored.
When you try and do anything with your photo that requires the origional file, Starter Edition goes to fetch the origional file from your hard drive to work with it. If the file is no longer where Starter Edition thinks it is, then Starter Edition tells you it is Disconnected.
At this point you need to tell Starter Edition where the photo was moved to. That's what the Reconnect process is all about. In order to reconnect your photo, you need to know where it was moved. Hopefully, it was simply moved to a different folder, and not deleted.
This Disconnected situation is typically caused by folks using Windows to re-arrainge their hard drive folders and their pictures AFTER having "imported" them into Starter Edition.
If your photos were moved in Windows, you can tell Starter Edition where they were moved to using Reconnect.
If your photos were deleted in Windows, unfortionatalty, they are gone, unless they still happen to be in your Windows Trash.
So.... what to do?
I'd use Starter Edition (or Elements) to get the file name of one of the Disconnected files.
Then, I'd use Windows Search to search for that file name.
Hopefully Windows Search will find your photos, safely stored in some other spot on your hard drive.