Problems converting from Elements 10 to Elements 2018

[Any_old_name1]

Sorry to post about this again, but my original posting has fallen out of the easily visible postings without getting a reply. And I'm getting real desperate here.

I'm wondering at this point if anyone has successfully upgraded from Elements 10 to Elements 2018 and kept their photo metadata?

Here's what I've tried:

1. Converting the Elements 10 catalog in Elements 2018. The conversion "succeeded", but when I load the catalog "no media" is there. Tried the conversion twice, same results, of course.

2. Used the "Write keyword tags and properties into photos" thing, hoping that Elements 10 would write the keyword tags that I used to make the albums into the photos. It spent a lot of time doing that, but when I import the pictures into Elements 2018, the keyword tags from Elements 10 are nowhere to be found.

3. I also tried arranging the photos (after "writing the keyword tags into photos") into folders, one folder per album. In the thought that as I imported the photos, Elements might figure out what I was trying to do. But as near as I can tell, the keyword tags are not in the photos anywhere that Elements 2018 is looking, so that was also doomed to fail. Kind of a "hail Mary" as they say :-).

Running low on ideas for how I can get the metadata from Elements 10 into Elements 2018 with my 10,000 pictures. There's no way that I have the time in my life to re-tag those 10,000 pictures. So I'm either stuck with Elements 10 forever, or I'll just bail out of using Elements altogether and find a different way to do organize my photos.

Do any of you veterans out there have any ideas that might help me?

[ankitd]

Hi,

1. Which platform are you on? Windows or Mac?

2. After converting the catalog when you see no media, open View menu -> Media Type and see all options are checked.

3. Do you see tags in the tags panel after conversion? Tags panel can be opened by clicking on tags/Info in the bottom right.

Thanks

[Any_old_name1]

Thanks for your help. I'm using Windows 10 Pro. All the media types are checked...but all I really need is Photos, since that's all I have :-). No photos, no tags, nothing, nada. Don't know what the catalog conversion did...apparently not much that was useful.

I had one other idea. I could bring the pictures in each folder into Elements 2018, the folders that I mentioned where I put the contents of each album into a separate folder. And tag all the pictures in each folder with the folder name (also the tag for the Elements 10 photos). And use the "File" -> "Write metadata to file". Then empty the catalog again and bring in each folder in turn and tag all photos in each folder. This might help since I should be adding the tags to the photos, and doing it in Elements 2018, so it should know where to look for the tags it applied itself.

However, assuming that the above works, the question of photos that are in multiple albums (photos that have multiple tags) still remains. When I import all the photos with the metadata written to them, and the duplicates are found, will Elements 2018 just throw away duplicates and the metadata written to them, or will it take the metadata from the duplicate and add it to the original, and then throw away the duplicate?

Any ideas about what will happen there? This will be a lot of work to do, so I'd like to have some idea that it might.

Thanks!

[ankitd]

Hi,

Did you get any error dialog during the conversion process? It is highly unlikely to not see any images after successful catalog conversion. Also, verify that correct catalog is open in Organizer. You can check your catalogs by opening Catalog Manager(File menu -> Manage Catalogs).

Please revert if your issue persists.

Thanks!

[Any_old_name1]

I finally did get the catalog conversion to work...I finally looked at the log despite the fact that it said that the conversion was successful, and it said that although the conversion had worked up to that point, it couldn't rename the files at the end. So I looked up that condition and it said to reboot my computer, and that would solve the renaming problem...so I guess that the file names that it wanted to rename to must have been in use/busy. Anyways, finally did get the conversion to go all the way through...

Very mysterious...the first time I tried the conversion, it errored out and said to go back to the version of Elements where the catalog was created and repair it there, then try the conversion again. So I did that, even though the repair said that it didn't find any problems. Then it said that the conversion succeeded when I re-ran it in Elements 2018. But when I brought up Elements 2018, no pictures. Tried that a couple of times, and finally went and looked at the conversion log like I said above. The whole process was anomalous, and didn't leave me with a lot of confidence in this software. But it does seem to be working, and the albums are there. The tags that were used to create the albums were not brought forward, but I suppose I can recreate them from the albums at some point.

I guess that I've got Elements 2018 going now, but I'm not confident that something won't happen and this house of cards will fall on me :-). Looking for other products as well, something more solid.

Thanks.