disconnected files

[Mtn]

Good Morning. I am a new user of the village and pse. I have tagged and placed photos in the organizer. I wanted to move them from my computer to a cd to get them off my hard drive. In trying to do that..I now get a message that says some photos are "disconnected, not available or that I am to connect them again". I have no clue what I have done or how to undo it.
Also, some of the photos I tried to edit now have a red circle with a line through it---like a non-smoking sign...which I also don't understand.
Thank you for your help.
LOVE the Village tutorials.
PH

[dj_paige]

You said you "place the photos in the organizer", but that's not what really happens in PSE. When you import photos into PSE, the photos remain on your hard disk, and the organzier points to them. Thus, when you move the files to the CD, the organizer still thinks they are in the same spot on your hard disk, and can't find them, and gives you the reconnect message.

To fix this, you would need to move the files back from your CD to the exact spot where they were before (with the exact same file names). Alternatively, you could move them anywhere on your hard drive and then reconnect each one (but this seems harder to do, if you ask me).

In the future, you need to stop using Windows (or Mac) tools to move and rename your photos. You need to use PSE only to move or rename your files.

To save hard disk space, you could use the PSE command Move Offline to allow you to move your files to a CD. PSE will still require that CD if you want to edit the photo. Also, please don't confuse this with making a backup. Moving your files offline is not a backup -- you still only have one copy of your photograph, and if the CD were to fail, you would then have zero copies of your photograph.

[JonE]

VG answer!