Catalog imported from Elements 14 organizer doesn't include notes

[joopvde]

Two months ago I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud. The application looks impressive and versatile. First action: import my catalog with 20.000 photos from Element 14 organizer. I found that the locations were not imported (apart from a few recent ones I pinpointed on the map). Also the events were not imported. That's loosing a LOT of information! I converted both manually to ordinary tags, a few days work but OK.

However, I also have over 2500 photos with additional info in the attached note. They seem to be lost in the conversion as well. Any suggestions on how to include them in the Lightroom catalog? Some batch operation, work-arounds?? Thanks for helping out.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

This is a known deficiency, that there is no translation of PSE Notes to any Lightroom field.

There are ways to transfer the notes to other fields, and those other fields will transfer into Lightroom. You would need to do this with something like the freeware ExifTool. You would have to write the metadata to the files from PSE, perform the transfer using ExifTool, and then read the metadata into Lightroom.

There was a discussion about this in this forum a long time ago (maybe 5 years ago), you can try to search for it.

[joopvde]

I had been thinking along the same lines, trying to write the note to the file in PSE. It writes tags to the file, but not the note, it seems.

Maybe my Irfanview doesn't show it? Thanks anyway for your quick response.

[dj_paige]

I'm pretty sure that back when I was using Elements (PSE 5), the Notes were indeed written to the files, and I don't know if Irfanview showed them or not. I do know that ExifTool showed that the notes were present, you might want to try that.

[joopvde]

You are right! ExifTool shows a "Notes" item, that contains the notes from PSE (after saving to file). Now I know at least a way to keep them at hand, maybe later I can make them appear in LR. ExifTool is not an easy tool...

[dj_paige]

Again, I'm trying to remember from a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure ExifTool has its own forum somewhere on that internet thing, and if you explain that you want to copy the information from the Notes field and append it to the caption field (for example), they could provide you with the code to do so, I think it's a one line piece of code.

[joopvde]

I could not find the specific usage of exiftool for my case on the internet, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, after reading the documentation of exiftool and doing some experiments with PSE and LR it turns out that this command line will do the trick:

exiftool "-XMP:Description<XMP:Notes" dir

where dir is a folder with photo files to be updated. In Windows, the command cannot be used as an icon on which a folder can be dropped, because file names cannot contain " or <. But a .bat file will do nicely.

Essentially, my problem is solved now:

• All photos with notes have a PSE tag (e.g. "Background info"), which is also visible in LR;
• All notes are present in the metadata (even without writing metadata to file, I found they are always there);
• When I see in LR a photo has a note, I can drop the file onto an exiftool icon to see the contents of the note;
• If so desired, I can copy it to the Description in LR.

Maybe after a complete backup of the catalog I will dare to apply exiftool to the root directory of the catalog. Exiftool doesn't seem to affect files without Notes. But my 2500 files with Notes are scattered over a zillion subdirectories, and that feels tricky...

Thanks a lot for helping me out! Your suggestions really made the difference and you did introduce me to this very convenient exiftool.

Kind regards, Joop

[dj_paige]

Maybe after a complete backup of the catalog I will dare to apply exiftool to the root directory of the catalog. Exiftool doesn't seem to affect files without Notes. But my 2500 files with Notes are scattered over a zillion subdirectories, and that feels tricky...

You are going to make backups of everything before trying this, aren't you?