Photoshop Elements 2021 Organizer
I seemed to have made a massive booboo.
I was trying to "clean up" my hard disk usage. Too many disks holding various bits of data; the rest of the data is Ok; no catalogues! However I forgot that I had "temporary" added a hard disk to a caddy; caddy is hidden behind second screen. As a result I now have only a few of the latest uploaded images pointed to the correct hard disk in Organizer, H:Drive. Most of 2023 images are now pointed to K: drive. Prior to that to pointed to D:Drive.
H:Drive does contain all the images as does K:Drive. The file structures are identical. However D:Drive does not; D;Drive now holds all my User files.
I know I should have moved everything around from within Organizer; mea culpa!
Is it possible the replace the K in the catalogue with H and the D with H?
Any help appreciated
Hi athegen,
I am trying to understand what you did.
I take it that at first, you had all your media files in a single drive, D.
Now, you have three drives registered in the catalog; D, H and K.
I also suppose that D is a local drive and that H an K are two distinct external drives.
You don't mention explicitly if at some time you made a copy of your media folders trees from D to one of those H and K drives outside of the organizer and if there was a change in the way Windows assigned drive letters to the external drives.
There is no magical tool in the organizer toolkit to change (replace) the drive letter by another one.
The way the catalog is structured to keep the location and identification of drives is NOT built on drive letters, because of the way Windows internally recognizes drives.
For instance, you know that when you you plug in your good old D drive while a new device has been plugged in and also assigned the D letter because it was the lowest letter available at that moment, your old D drive now will be assigned the letter E or above...
So, since the organizer was built on a sqlite database engine (circa PSE6), the catalog has to recognize drives in a constant way by another disk property which is the internal serial number of the drive.
In the database structure, there is a 'volume' table storing the identification of a drive and its properties. Like any item in the database (media, tag...) there is an internal (never displayed) numerical catolog item number. The properties show three ways to identify a drive: the internal serial number read by Windows when the disk is accessed the first time, the drive letter and the drive name you can assign and modify yourself.
Also in that database structuve there is a media table storing the properties of each single photo or video. The property 'location on disk' is divided in two parts: identification of the disk, pointing to the PSE internal number in the 'volume table' abobe. The index search finds the correct item from the serial number of the disk and returns the drive letter.
The second part is the full path you are use are yourself to specify a location in the folders/subfolders tree.
The organizer concatenates the drive letter and the path. When you look at the location of a picture in the properties panel on the right of the display, that's what is shown.
You have NO way to search by drive letter in the organizer, bu you can display your folders tree in the left folders panel in tree mode.
So, what can you do to change drive letters and identification in the organizer?
- Windows lets you assign a new letter which will be recognized and stay 'sticky' afterwards independently from available free lettters. More 'techy': you can assign freely a new internal number.
- If you are acquainted with database management, you can browse / fiddle directly with the contents of the database.
- The changes using Windows may also need using the programming calculator to convert hexadecimal data to decimal.
To summarize, once we can be sure of what was your exact workflow and what happened in which order in your three drives, I can try to suggest ways to solve your problem at least partly.
