A Leasson Learned

[LinusF]

I've been entertaining myself sorting out a number of issues following a combination of two catalogs, a full backup, a conversion to PSE, a full backup, and a restore to a new computer. One, of many, lessons learned is that PSE 6, at least, probably keeps a rather "flat" file structure for tags. I know this because I had (since Album 3) used the "?" to indicate an unknown of a category. Hence under People, the Jones family might have a ? tag to indicate to me that at least one unidentified "Jones" is in the image. Same in "Smith". Same under Places, so that in Hawai'i there might be a ? tag to represent unknown locations. Etc. After RESTOREing, the images with the ? tag can show up just about anywhere.
RECOMMENDATION: I now have a "?Jones" tag and a "?Smith" tag and a "?Hawai'i" tag. I hope the gods of the relational database are once again happy. And I sure which this database allowed for inheritance! It would really, really help.

[Karin Sue]

You mentioned in another thread that you merged your catalogs by doing a write to files from the one catalog and then an import into the other.

Is it just the images that were newly imported that have wayward ? tags? Only the end tag is imported/written. The hierarchy is not maintained.

In any case your new system is better. I early learned that having a Joan tag in each Family, Friends, and Photographer categories gets confusing. Tags are now Joan, JoanSmith and JoanPhoto.

[LinusF]

I had two different WinXP file structures for the images of the two different catalogs. At the WinXP level I shifted the WinXP folders and the included image files into the second catalog's WinXP data structure. Then I would GET the files into PSE6 just like any other series of images from files in that data structure. (And, since the images were no longer available to the original catalog, I had confirmation that they had indeed been found and moved over.) This might be a bit tedious, but I have not heard of a better approach, using the limited tools of PSE6.
And I'm with you on the naming convention. That should be high up on the FAQ/hints list to help future users. Or, as I mentioned, PSEn should recognise inheritance so that the Joan, John, Jason, Jill tags under a Jones family under People would know that Joan Jones is not Joan Smith. And that Jordan under Jones/People is not (necessarily) related to Jordan under Places.