Thursday, October 11, 2012

Adobe PhotoShop Elements 10 to 11 Catalog Conversion Fails

I recently purchased version 11 of PhotoShop Elements, cause I didn't like version 10 that well, and version 11 was reviewed to be much better and has some new features that I wanted to try.

The download and installation of version 11 went off without a hitch, but I ran into a problem when I tried to convert the previous version  {Vers. 10} of the Catalog into version 11.

Note: the Catalog is the tags, albums, people etc. that you use to organize your collection of media..The whole purpose of Elements IS the catalog!!!

Basically, the Catalog conversion process would fail and advise me to run the version of the software {Adobe Photoshop Elements 10} that created the catalog and repair the catalog and try again.....

I did, I did, again, search, read articles and again....no luck

A web search did not turn up any answers either...

So I reluctantly went to Adobe's help site, and fired up a chat session with a support person to try to get resolution...... yada yada, three hours later, and no solution...don't get me started on the sorry state of software support these days....just horrible! The support person actually suggested that I start over with the new version and abandon the old catalog!! Are they crazy!!!

So my next step was to post a plea for help to an Adobe Forum, and with some tips and more thinking, I actually got the Catalog Conversion process to run...

To see my post in the forum follow this link:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4765679#4765679


Basically I think the problem {where the conversion fails} is one of permissions. e.g. the conversion process must run with Administrator rights.

I have NOT tested this to be able to say this is the problem 100% since there are a number of other things that could have come into play, and I have a life and don't fell obliged to debug Adobe's software.

 With the idea that permissions might be the problem, I created a shortcut to the Elements Organizer11.exe and right clicked and selected "Run as Administrator".--> Catalog conversion was successful this time!  Note: if you run Elements in the standard way, you get a  shell process that lets you select the "Organizer" or the "Editor". I'm not sure running in the standard way with Administrator rights cascade down to the Organizer process???

OK any more writing about this will just confuse the issue, if you have questions, ask.

2 comments:

  1. So after getting the catalog issue solved, it was on to actually using PSE 11.... and that's not working out. After adding some photos to the organizer, it crashed, and continues to crash everytime it starts up. So back to problem solving mode...can't say that I'm impressed with this release of Elements.

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  2. OK just got off the chat window with Adobe and got the issue resolved. It deserves a separate post for the solution.

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