Switching from Photoshop Elements PC to Mac

Hi everyone, another Mac newbie here. The rot started with an iPod touch, next thing it was an AppleTV, then I somehow found myself in a queue on launch day for an iPad... and now I'm here, a proud new iMac owner!

Anyway on with my question...

I've been a PC Photoshop Elements user for many, many years. I was using PE8 on my old PC and have bought the exact same version for my iMac. Can someone please advise how to best transfer over my entire 60Gb catalogue of photos to my iMac - without losing my tags and keywords? It's taken me years to build up my albums and get to a point where I can search my entire catalogue for a person or place and find everything instantly - there's no way I can re-enter all that info again!

Many thanks,

Steve

PE8 on PC uses a new organizer - whereas PE8 on Mac uses Adobe Bridge.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 Review - ComputerShopper.com

Photoshop Elements 8 is also available for Mac OS X. It's a more significant upgrade for users of that platform, since Adobe skipped Version 7 on the Mac. The editor is nearly identical between the Windows and Mac versions, other than tweaks to fit the Mac interface. The Mac version, however, doesn't include the Organizer module, but instead ships the Bridge CS4 graphics browser that's included with Photoshop CS4. This is an excellent image manager by itself, but it lacks the automatic tagging feature, face recognition, and backup/synchronization found in Organizer.

Click to expand...

I have not had to do a transfer yet - but you may be missing some features when you use bridge vs what the organizer did on PC. Not the greatest news I know. I think the tags should stay with the photos but there is no guarantee as I don't know what the database organizer uses.

Not that this helps you a whole bunch (unless nothing else works and you need to do facial recognition again) but I ended up using Picasa for my name tagging.
CreativeTechs Tips Add Face Recognition to Lightroom w/ Picasa!
Does very well finding people in my huge library.

Frankly this is a question that's well worth calling up Adobe and asking. You're hardly the only person who's found themselves in this situation recently, so they probably have an answer.

As a side note, I should mention that people who are serious around keywording their photos ONCE and ONCE only should only enter keywords in the photo's IPTC fields. This way, the information will be transferable should you ever change photo-management programs. Bridge, as an example, can read keywords from the IPTC fields. Other programs can too (see my sig for an example).

Thanks for your suggestions guys, after some experimentation and frustration over the weekend I eventually hit on the solution. PE stores the tag info in its' own database and not in the image files. You can force it to write this info to the files by selecting them and going to "File > Write Keyword Tag And Properties Info To Photo".

Article on Adobe's support site here: Adobe Elements Organizer 8 * Write keyword tag information into your files

Must say that I wasn't at all impressed with Bridge, ended up downloading a 30 day trial of Aperture 3. Wish I'd done that before buying PE8 but you live and learn!

Cheers,

Steve

switching

Hi there

I have also been using PC and Photoshop Elements for many years, putting tags and categorising my photos. Currently, I am using Elements 8.

I was just considering changing from PC to Mac, so I wanted to ask you - what is your experience and recommendations for me ? Should I switch ?

Has your operation; "write keyword tag information into your files" been successful ?

Best regards, and thanks in advance.
Olafur

Yes the write tag info into files option did work, but I no longer use Elements 8 for most of my work. Using Aperture 3 to manage all my photos now, and do the bulk of the touching up as well (cropping/exposure/red-eye etc). PE8 is reserved for more advanced editing. Aperture handles uploading to Facebook albums, Mobile me galleries, Flickr etc. automatically and keeps them in sync. You can get a 30 day trial of Aperture and I highly recommend you give it a go... was a bit of a revelation to me after using the PE organiser for so long! Oh and PE8 for Mac doesn't come with the Organiser you get on the PC, it comes with something called Adobe bridge which I hated...

I'm really glad I switched overall and just wish I'd done it a few years ago!

Cheers,

Steve

thanks

Thank you very much for your prompt and detailed answer

Best regards,