Using Elements at an Organization

Question

I have been tasked with proposing a method to catalog my organization's photographs and am looking into Photoshop Elements.  I am concerned that the keywords/ratings/comments done on one computer will not easily transfer to another computer.  For example, let's say I import a batch of photographs using Elements onto our server and keyword them.  If someone else on a different computer searchs using the same keyword, will they be shone the images I keyworded on my computer?  The goal is to make this as user friendly as possible.  Does anyone know how to easily sync many computers utilizing one shared server but using different Elements programs without it requiring a lot of work by each employee?  The goal is to make this a long term photograph cataloging protocol.

Answer 1

I think such an effort with PSE is doomed to failure, because PSE simply was not designed to allow multiple users of the same catalog, nor was it designed to allow the catalog to be stored on a server. (Yes, I know some people have a work-around for the catalog on a server problem, but you still have the problem that PSE does not allow multi-user access). If you, and all users, had a rock-solid understanding of how the PSE Organizer worked, you *might* be able to get this to work with great effort (but even so, you will never be able to achieve multi-user write access, you might be able to achieve pseudo-multi-user read access). I think you are most likely wasting your time using PSE in this effort.
Perhaps a program that was designed for multi-user access to the database might meet your needs better. In that case, I know there is a piece of software that does this. It's called Phase One Media Pro 1 ... I have never used it myself, so I only state that it seems to meet your needs, but I am not recommending this software based upon personal experience.