I'm lost - PSE8 Organizer won't start

[Juergen]

Dear John,
does your comment mean, that this is normal behaviour of PRE/PSE?

..... it's not a bug, it's a feature ......

I think it make sense to double check this with a total new and empty catalog.

br Juergen

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

My conclusion: only add pictures to PRE which are already included in the Organizer.

I was congratulating you on the way that you reached that conclusion. I know that you posted that you would double check that to confirm it but it was a good piece of deduction.

[George Tyndall]

Juergen,

I do not have any experience with PRE/PSE8, so I don’t have a solution for your predicament, but I can tell you that the chief reason I did not “upgrade” to 8 is precisely my concern with how 8 handles the PSE organizer/catalog in comparison with 7.

With the 8 bundle, PSE and PRE share the catalog, whereas with 7 images in the PSE organizer/catalog get into the PRE organizer/catalog only when one has actually used them for a PRE project. When one is ready to move on to a new project with PRE7, one can do a Select All in the PRE catalog followed by Delete and all the media will disappear from the PRE catalog, but this will have no effect whatever on the PSE7 catalog. It remains untouched.

When you upgraded from 7 to 8, did you leave PSE7 on your HDD (Adobe allows multiple versions to be left on the HDD)? Did you choose to “convert” your 7 catalog to 8? If you did not choose the latter, then you should still be able to open your PSE7 catalog and find that all your albums and tags, etc. are still intact.

BTW, if you are successful, the very next step should be to create a backup of your catalog: Personally, I do not use the method provided by Adobe; instead, I keep the PSE catalog and all the media that it keeps track of on one external 1TB HDD, then I back this up, often, to a second external 1TB external HDD. If ever the first HDD crashes and is unrecoverable (which has happened to me), all I need to do is click on the PSE7 catalog database file on the second HDD and — voila! — my PSE7 catalog immediately opens with all albums and tags intact as if nothing had happened. At that point, I immediately back that HDD up to a third external HDD.

P.S. When my 1TB “primary” and “secondary” drives are 90% full (at which point my catalog will likely be very large), I will start a new PSE7 catalog on 2 new 1TB external HDDs. (1TB external HDDs can no be had for just a little over $100 each.) Do not worry about having multiple catalogs on multiple drives; to access each separate catalog, all you need do is click on the catalog database file and PSE7 will instantly open that particular catalog (in the same way that clicking on a MSW document on any HDD will open first the MSW program followed by the MSW file).

[Juergen]

Dear George,
very valuable ideas.
In fact your explanations and concerns are confirming my findings. However I have to do a final check for my findings with a very new PSE catalog.
(.... don't want to risk my 30000 pictures ...) But will take some time (next weekend) as I have to do some other jobs (not only PRE/PSE )
I will report my result in this thread.

I had PRE7 installed but frankly speaking, I did not create any real video project.
Just did some trainings / learnings with lynda_com. So I can not judge any PRE7 organizer behaviour.
But I did a lot with PSE (version 5 to 8) with great fun and great succes w/o any troubles.

I started video editing project first with PRE/PSE 8 (my very old 8mm movies from year 1975).
PRE/PSE7 now is not available on my PC.

Finally your backup process sounds very very interesting.
I'm using the PSE backup feature and it takes my about 5 hour (complete backup).
Unfortunatelly I do not understand your procedure completely.
I would appreciate a little bit more detailed explanation (I'm not a PC specialist ......)

Waiting for your answer .....

thanks
br Juergen

[George Tyndall]

...your backup process sounds very very interesting.
I'm using the PSE backup feature and it takes my about 5 hour (complete backup).
Unfortunatelly I do not understand your procedure completely.
I would appreciate a little bit more detailed explanation (I'm not a PC specialist ......)

Waiting for your answer .....

thanks
br Juergen

Juergen,

It's simply a matter of using File>Catalog in PSE7 to create a catalog in a "Custom" location (the default is the C Drive). Once I've created the catalog on one external HDD, I use SmartSyncPro to create a copy of that catalog on a second external HDD. As I said, all the media that the catalog will keep track of are also on that same external HDD -- an additional advantage of this method is that, when I want to work on my projects at a number of different locations, all I need do is attach the two external HDDs to any computer that has PRE/PSE7 installed, and I'm "good to go."

The nice thing about SmartSyncPro is that it does incremental backups, in other words, when I click the icon to back the first HDD to the second, it quickly scans both drives and then moves only the files that have changed since I last clicked the icon -- including the catalog. I click the icon, on the average, every 5 minutes, which means that I can never lose more than about 5 minutes of my work.