[Martyn]

Hi, guys.

I need some help and advice arising from a recent hard drive crash. This was on a fairly old computer and, in consequence, I bought a new one and moved from XP to Windows 7. I was using Photoshop Elements 6 for tagging, organising, and cataloging.

Although I managed to re-install PSE on the new machine and get it working with W7, two bad things happened. First, only about half of my image folders were transferred successfully to the W7 library/folder structure; second, I've had difficulty transferring the PSE catalog files from XP to W7 and reconnecting lots of images.

I have since managed to get the rest of my image folders from the old hard drive to the new machine, but the cataloging has gone to Hell in a hand-basket. I think I'm dealing with largely dysfunctional image software running in a largely dysfunctional operating system. I would like to find an alternative to PSE, but I would sorely like to recover and carry over my metadata if possible. Ultimately I would like to escape from Microsoft too, but that might have to wait.

So first, am I likely to be able to recover my catalogs and reconnect my image files, or should I cut my losses now? I've been at this for a while already and probably need to start over again with my catalog files. Can anyone tell me precisely which catalog components I should copy from my XP hard drive, and where I should paste them in the W7 structure? I'll then give reconnecting one more try.

Second question: what do you recommend as a viable alternative for tagging, organizing, running slide shows, and so on? I'd obviously like to avoid a recurrence of this loss-of-metadata problem in the future. Ideally I'd like to keep my images and my wife's images in separate folders on our NAS and access them from various computers that are currently running XP, Vista, and W7. In the future, I might replace my wife's computer with a Mac and replace W7 on mine with Linux (I'll spare you the full rant). I do only simple editing and will probably never use most of PSE's features.

Thanks in advance,

Martyn

[JohnR]

You could give Picasa a try. There appears to be a Linux version available. I'm not sure if it will meet all your needs, I use it casually and it's pretty fast and easy for simple image manipulations.

If your wife is moving to a Mac anyway she might prefer iPhoto. I personally don't like it but apparently a lot of people use it.

[Martyn]

Thanks, John. You're the second person to suggest Picasa. Windows Photo Gallery has been suggested too, but I'm trying to move away from MS if I can. Still struggling to clean up the PSE catalogs...

[navi]

Adobe Lightroom- Good for catalogues &  RAW processing.