Leaving Adobe Elements behind.

[hesmith1029]

I am on a mission to once and for all move off of Adobe Elements Organizer.   I have collection of approx 125,000 photo files, which includes companion raw and jpgs, edited versions, and scans of both old photos and the matching negative.   Lots of scanned photos and even more digital photos complete with geotag info.

My Evaluation of IMATCH looks good so far,  I think it can do everything I need.  But the learning curve may take a bit.

I make heavy use of of the Adobe Keywords, People Tags, Place tags, and Event tags.   I saw migration tool from Lightroom, but can not find a trace of one for Elements.   (The elements database is sqlite, and can be read by sqlite tools,  Schema is bit messy.  Willing to collaborate with someone on writing a tool.)   

I like the Elements design and layout.  The problem is that has just too many quirks and bugs.  And the never FIX anything.   So what I really need is advice on setting up IMATCH to do allow retrieval of items by People, Places, Events, and Keywords (as defined by Adobe).  It looks like some combination of Collections and hierarchical keywords\metadata should do the trick.   

The other big issue to simplifying the migration to avoid the loss of too much data.   Elements can push all of its stuff into the metadata on the files.  These all become simple flat metadata entries.   Need to figure out a way to get them back into the Hierarchies.   Or get the location tags back into a usable format.

Thanks in advance

Herb

[Mario]

General note: Adobe does many proprietary things in their applications. Especially in the SOHO applications like PS Elements. Not every piece of data PSE maintains can be exported or imported into other applications. I haven't seen/used PSE for years so I'm not really the guy with the best knowledge.

I make heavy use of of the Adobe Keywords, People Tags, Place tags, and Event tags.

As far as I know, there are no Adobe keywords. Unless Adobe invented something specific to PSE.
Usually Adobe applications store keywords in XMP metadata, in the official XMP IPTC keywords and/or the special Adobe hierarchical keywords.

Tip: You can see all the metadata IMatch has imported from your your images in the Metadata Panel when you switch it to the Browser mode.
Check there if you can see keywords.

I have no idea where PSE stores "People Tags", "Place Tags" or "Event Tags".
If PSE stores these elements only in its proprietary database you will have to find a way to export it into one of the many import formats IMatch supports, or let PSE write it into metadata.

Elements can push all of its stuff into the metadata on the files.

This is probably good. If the data is in the metadata of your files, IMatch can access it.
It would help to see a sample image so we can see which metadata PSE "pushes" into the file.

Or get the location tags back into a usable format.

Again, I don't know what PSE or you consider as a "location tag".

The term "tag" is used by entry-level applications for all kinds of things, from keywords to labels to whatnot.
There is a proper standard for storing GPS data and GPS location data (country, state, location, ...) in EXIF GPS and XMP metadata. If PSE supports that you will see all this info in IMatch automatically. Did you check? Files with embedded GPS data show a globe icon in the file window and you can see them in the Map Panel.

I'd recommend to create a small sample image and then export/push all the data mentioned above into the file.
Then ZIP and attach here (up to 2MB). We can then see what data the file contains and tell you how IMatch can make use of it.

[hesmith1029]

Here are two typical files with all the info that PSE can shove into them.   Looks like all the useful stuff is in the IPTC keywords list.  Along with a lot of junk as Adobe never deletes anything from the list.  They also have GPS coordinates in them from GeoCoding  (Geosetter and track logs).

I have modified the data driven standard category Location to have 4 active levels (country, state, city, location). 

I suspect that I need to build out a People and an Event Category that similar to the structure in PSE.   Then use the keywords that were imported with photo ingestion to select all the photo with say Herb in them.   Then assign them the People|Herb category.  (If you see a way to automate this I welcome the suggestion)

[jch2103]

Not attached....

[JohnZeman]

Attachment should show now.

[Mario]

There is only one attached file and it contains no metadata at all.
Please ZIP files before uploading. The community software will re-code images otherwise and strip metadata.

[hesmith1029]

Ok here is the zipped file with two photos

[Mario]

I have imported the files into IMatch. As you have probably seen yourself, both files contain GPS coordinates, location data, keywords (tags) which IMatch automatically imports also into a hierarchy, descriptions and stuff.

The image of the gentleman in the red shirt also has face annotations, which IMatch displays in the Viewer.
The XMP region has no "tag", though. Just the face information (coordinates) is in the metadata, but no associated tag IMatch could use.

Check out the @Keywords, "IMatch Workflow" and "IMatch Standard" categories in the Category View to see how IMatch has automatically organized the file by camera info, location, keywords etc.
You see all metadata in the IMatch Metadata panel and all keywords in the IMatch Keywords panel.

The GPS coordinates allow IMatch to show you the files in the Map Panel.

Looks like IMatch does a perfect job of pulling all the info from these files.