Upgrading from Photo Album 2.0 to Elements

[jd1069]

Hey all. My wife has a great collection of digital pics. She currently uses Photo Album 2.0 for organizational purposes. We are wanting to upgrade to Elements. I understand that there is an "organizer" in elements. Does anyone know if Elements supports the upgrade from Photo Album 2.0. Anyone have any experience moving off of Photo Album 2.0? She is trying to avoid having to re-tag 8,000 pics. Thanks for your answers in advance.

[Wendy]

Hi ...

... and welcome to the forum :)

Organiser grew out of Album so I'm pretty sure that transferring things across should be OK. Hopefully one of the users of the Organiser will be able to help you with it :)

Wendy

[Barb O]

I worked with 2 people to upgrade from Photoshop Album 2 to Photoshop Elements 4 and it worked fine. We did a Reconnect All Missing Files and a File > Catalog > Recover under PS Album 2 in order to to have the PS Album 2 catalog "in good shape" before doing the install of PS Elements 4. PSE 4 then made a copy of the PSA2 catalog for safekeeping and then upgraded the PS Album 2 catalog to its PSE4, keeping the Tags.

Now I have not seen any feedback posted for PS Album 2 to PS Elements 5. I recollected that someone posted that PSE 5 rejected an upgrade from PS Album 1. However, PS Album 2 is the most recent version of Album so it would only make sense for Adobe to support upgrading from it to Elements. Sorry that I can not give you a definitive answer.

Perhaps someone else will post or you could call Adobe Customer Service and ask if they support PSA2 to PSE5 upgrade of the catalog.

[Cmcburnett]

I have Photoshop Album 2 and each time I have added a newer version of Photoshop Elements I have not had any problems upgrading into the new organizer. Barb gave very good instructions on how to upgrade. I do not have PSE5 yet, so I'm not sure about that version, I've heard good and bad things about the program, however I am going to upgrade, I presently have PSE4. There have been posts in the forum that the help menu inside PSE5 is not good at all, you may want to get more input from someone who has 5 if you depend on the help menu inside PSE. Good luck.

[jd1069]

I just thought I'd write up the results / procedure I used for the conversion from Photo Album 2.0 to Photoshop Elements 5 in case someone else needed the information.

Here was my scenario. I had photo album 2.0 on an older computer (running XP home) that contained about 8,000 pics with tags. This was about 8 gigs of data. I wanted to migrate these pics and tags to a new computer (running XP pro) and upgrade to PE5. This is what I did:

Step 1 - Install PE5 on new computer

Step 2 - "Burn" a copy of the PA2 complete catalog and pics to an external drive. I used the Photo Album - File - Burn menu. (also re-linked any missing files)

Step 3 - disconnect external drive from old computer and connect external drive to new computer.

Step 4 - I then went to the new computer with PE5 and "recovered" catalog and pics using the external drive as the source of the catalog and pics that needed to be recovered. I wasn't sure if PE5 would like the fact that it's recovering a catalog from PA2. To my surprise it was fine with it. What PE5 did was recover the catalog and pictures from the external drive and then it converted the catalog into the format it wanted.

It all worked great. :) The wife did a sanity check on the tags and pics and everything converted over properly. Anyway I just thought I'd write everything up. Thanks for all the previous posts and thoughts.

I'm sure we will be posting beginner questions about PE5 now. :)

[Wendy]

Hi ...

Oh that is great news ... so pleased that everything worked out OK :)


Wendy