Tags in Lightroom
There are a few threads about this. Search for Elements and Organizer as well, since the Photoshop Elements Organizer is the same thing, essentially, as Album2.
The short answer is ''sort of''. You can import your work from Album and it will keep the tags and collections, but in my case it also screwed some up. It also didn't import some things without warning me about it - both formats like .bmp's and .gif's and .mov's that LR doesn't support, and anything where there were two files with the same base name but different extension (gronk.psd and gronk.jpg). However, it also lost a bunch of my tags altogether, specifically the last dozen or two. It seemed to have some fixed number of tags that it could cope with and I guesss I exceeded that number.
How many images? How may tags? Have you ever written the tags back to the files? Any raw images (.nef, etc.)?
Tags in Lightroom
When I started using LR 1.0 (purged my beta libraries, etc.), I did an import from Elements 3. The tags arrived pretty intact for the most part (only 7000 images, I forget how many tags).
It did seem that not all keywords were applied to the appropriate images, but it was still a much better starting place than nothing. I really had frustrations with hierarchical tags/keywords and how they imported... fixed that by moving all the keywords to the main level and then starting over with the hierarchy (moving family names to the main level, recreating ''family'' on the main level, and then moving the names keywords back into ''family''). It did not take too long since it didn't involve retagging any pictures, just moving the keywords around.
I love LR and haven't been back to Elements yet except for graphics work, no photo stuff at all.
I wound up with keywords in both places. I had both ''People-%26gt;Family-%26gt;John'', and ''John'' at the top level. However, for the tags that imported (as I said, a number of them didn't) almost all of the images were tagged with the hierarchical version and only some had the top-level version. So, what I did was to select each top-level tag in turn, select all of the images and look at the keywords in the right-hand panel. In most cases, all of the ''John'' images also had the keyword ''People-%26gt;Family-%26gt;John'', so I simply deleted ''John'' from that panel, which deletes the keyword from the images, then deleted ''John'' from the keywords tree in the left panel as well. In a very few cases, the ''People-%26gt;Family-%26gt;John'' showed with an asterisk, which means that some of the ''John'' images didn't have it. So, I first deleted the asterisk, which gives all the selected images the hierarchical tag, then proceeded as above. I suspect that the images with the top level tag had had tags written back to the jpg, but I'm not really sure.
This may sound complicated, but it only took a few minutes to fix all of these tags.
Of course, that doesn't fix the missing tags problem. I'm still dealing with going through and redoing those by hand. Major bummer.
Still, I agree with Robin. I love LR and am very glad I switched.
Hi - It seems that Robin and Jerry imported from Photoshop Elements 3, not from Adobe Album? I use the latter, and have over 100 independent tags just in the 4 original groups (people, Places, Whatever, Others) and hierarchies are of no importance: I have Dogs, Cats, John, Eyes, Feet, Show?, Printed, etc. and it does not matter which are people. It sounds to me as though importing would not work. Is the import facility limited to Photoshop Element tags? or does it mention album ''catalogs'' which are kept in all users\application data\adobe\photoshop album\catalogs and \catalog folders?
I imported from PSE4, but it should be exactly the same for Album. Importing does work but, as I said, not without problems. I'm not sure about catalogs, but PSE collections do come across and become LR collections, though they lose their order. I had about 200 different tags, and about 150 of them came across fine, though sometimes duplicated as flat and hierarchical. The other 50 or so simply disappeared.
Of course, the LR import function does all this by reading the PSE (or Album, which is nearly identical) database, which it understands.
I cannot get Lightroom to recognize that I have Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 on my computer. Thus, when I go to File, Import from ... it says Import from Elements rather than Import from Album as the Help feature says it should if one has Album on their computer. Does anyone out there have experience importing from Album Starter Edition? Do I have upgrade to the ''full'' Album software first?
The other posts in this string are not too encouraging about this mapping-over process from Album. I might just stay where I am or wait for Lightroom 2.0 and hope for better results then. You would have thought that Adobe would have made sure that this feature worked perfectly.
Thank you.
I'm not sure if it supports the Album 1, 2, or 3 Starter catalogs, but if not, you can download the free demo of Photoshop Elements 5, upgrade your Album catalog in there to Elements, and then import into LR. But like many say, there are issues with importing from Elements, so it may not work perfectly.
Well - if it says ''Import from PSElements'' it will definitely not import from Album. I have Album 2, and believe the starter edition 3 is just a marketing designation. Album simply uses MS Access as a database. Does PSElements use Access, i.e. can you edit its stuff in Access? I agree with Jonah, and it looks like Lightroom and Bridge (even the one in CS3) are animals non-compatible with earlier Adobe programs.
-
yes, Elements uses access. It is the exact same type of file as Album. PSElements Organizer is what PSAlbum evolved into. After Album 2.0, it was absorbed into PSElements 3.0 as the Organizer and no further Album development was made, as it is now part of Elements. Album 3.0 starter was a feature limited version of PSElements Organizer 3.0. PSElements will upgrade your Album Catalog so it matches the features, etc . . . of PSElements. You can then import into Lightroom with ''Import from Elements'' (although, I vaguely remember seeing an option to import the Album 2.0 catalog when I imported my Elements catalog . . . I hadn't deleted the old Album 2.0 catalog file or folders, and Lightroom found them). But like I stated earlier, there are bugs with importing from Elements, some people experience them, others do not . . . and most of those that experience them do not have any major issues with them.
I am on my third attempt at importing over 15K images from PSA 2 into LightRoom. I think there is a connection between Antivirus s/w and the import process as my Norton suddenly had a problem with its subscription status. After a short detour to fix that problem, I have managed to import most everything into LightRoom, but the Keywords are another story. It only brought over 4 of the 10 major tag levels from PSA. I learned that the import will work best in small chunks, like dividing into folders while in PSA to split it up. The import will only do the Keyword import at the successful completion of the image loading into the catalog. So, I think disabling my antivirus s/w and importing small chinks will give me yet another combination to attempt to see if I can blow out a year's worth of images and then re-import to get ALL of the keywords to show up.
Has anyone been this far and found a way to ensure the tags make it into keywords in LoghtRoom?
I think my PSA was reaching its limit on image management b/c of some strange instances of NOT seeing image files when you direct it right to the file. I made the decision to try LightRoom but am afraid it was not much of an improvement over PSA.
The lack of information about this very critical step of importing a catalog is troubling to me. What good does all the fancy smancy photo editing gadgets do me if I can't make the leap?
I echo Bill's fancy-smancy remark, especially if you look at the feeble (and incompatible with earlier software) cataloguing abilities of the CS2 and CS3 Bridge. What is a Photoshop user to do? Compatibility has always been an Adobe strong suit. There used to be a third-party catalog program ImagAXS that also disappeared, leaving nothing but bubbles of months of tagging work.
No comments:
Post a Comment