odbc error

[Andyd]

Hello All!

I just replaced my hard drive and have reinstalled PSE 3. I have moved my saved photos into the Elements folder. I wanted to "import" them into Organizer. Occasionally I do not delete images off my camera and take more then unload. I’d like Organizer to recognize the image is there. (I usually does) Now when I ‘get photos’ from folders/hard drive it errors out at about 29% with the error message something of the like ODBC error, time incorrect. (not exact, but I think you may understand.)

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Andy

[kayser]

Hi Andy,

Have you already tried recovering your catalog?

Hold down the Ctrl key while you are starting the Organizer and you should get a pop-up asking if you want to recover the current catalog - say yes and it will do the catalog recover.

[Andyd]

Thanks for the info Kay!

Did not work. I still get the error message: The ODBC data source reported the following error:

*[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Invalid datetime format(null)*

[kayser]

Oh, I was hoping that would solve it.:(

Hopefully someone else has better ideas.

You might, in the meantime, check out the Adobe user-to-user forums, some people have commented on this and similar issues. Maybe there is a solution buried there?

Here's one thread to start with:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@590.arcafauC6X1.7@.3bbde784/0

[Ward Grant]

Andy,
I think Kay has started you on the right track-there have been other posts about blank or invalid date fields causing problems with Organizer imports.

Are all your pictures in one folder? If they are, you could sort by date and see if any of the files show a blank date field. If you find files with this problem, move these files to a Temp folder and import the other files. One suggestion in the other forum was to mass convert these files (the one with a blank date that you moved to a Temp folder) to another format (say JPG to PSD) and then import the new formats. The theory is the file conversion should fill in the date field. If you need help with that, please post back.

If your files are in multiple folders, you could import one folder at a time until you find the one that is bad. Then you could do a similar repair as outlined above.

[kayser]

Thanks for jumping in, Ward. There are some strange but apparently not uncommon Organizer errors out there. I'm hoping that I don't personally have to deal with any of them, but if I do, hopefully by that time I'll have already run across it in this forum.

[Andyd]

OK to make things even stranger…

My pictures are mostly in the “my pictures” folder. A good chunk of them are in:

C:\Documents and Settings\andy\My Documents\My Pictures\Adobe\Digital Camera Photos.

The rest are just in folders in

C:\Documents and Settings\andy\My Documents\My Pictures\

I tried to work backwards and locate a file that was causing PSE to error out. I started with folders in “My Pictures” and I asked Elements to get photos for files folders. I’d select one folder and import them. I then got daring and started selecting a few folders at once all with no problems. I got it down to one folder with a problem, tried that one and one photo caused an error. Great you think?

I went back to import and selected that one photo and it took it fine! I may just continue with importing a few folders at a time. I am getting a lot of this file already exists, but that is fine. Strange thing still.

[Ward Grant]

Barb Olson, another forum user, posted this in the adobeforums one time. It may shed some light on why you are seeing the file already exists message.

The intent for the Organizer is that the same photo will not be imported twice. However, don't draw the conclusion that this means that the same file name alone will cause the Organizer to consider a photo file a duplicate.

Multiple factors are considered for identifying a photo as a duplicate - same name, size, date, time are the notes I found.

Because duplicates of photos are often in different folders, the fact that one file is in a different folder than another does not prevent it from being identified as a duplicate photo.

If you want to get around the characterization of a given photo as a duplicate of anther, a minor change in the file name will accomplish that.

Barb O