import Photoshop Elements 9 Albums into iPhoto '11 Albums

Question

Level 1

4 points

import Photoshop Elements 9 Albums into iPhoto '11 Albums

Hi,

I have about 10,000 pictures organized into albums on Photoshop Elements on my PC, and I'd like to move them all into iPhoto on my iMac, and retain all the album organization.

I've tried this process several times, and I am able to transfer the photos, but I loose all of the album organization in the process. I followed the steps for Photoshop to iPhoto conversion at the bottom of this post ( http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080702225914AAmKVhU), but what I get in iPhoto is just an organization by the folder on the hard drive, no albums.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Dec 26, 2010 4:22 PM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

166,008 points

Dec 27, 2010 12:30 AM in response to stillerz

The article you reference is not what you are trying to do. That person is more concerned with the organisation of files on the HD than in the iPhoto Window.

If you want to duplicate your Folder Tree in iPhoto:

Start at the bottom of the hierarchy and drag a folder of images to the Album Heading in iPhoto. The pics will be imported and an Album of the same name created.

You can then create the Enclosing Folders in the iPhoto Window (File -> New Folder) and drag the Album to it. Folders can contain other Folders (Nested Folders) and Albums.

However, is your folder system date based? Then this form of organisation is a bit pointless in iPhoto when Smart Albums or the Calendar tool (Click on the wee magnifying glass in the Search Box) mean you can find the photos taken on any day, month or year at a click. With Smart Albums it's easy to find photos from specific range - say, June 3 to August 25, 2009 etc.

If your folder system is theme based - Xmas pics, Birthday pics etc, then you'll find Keywords are much more flexible, and can be used in conjunction with other criteria for making Smart Albums and searches.

Regards

TD

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Answer 2

stillerz Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 27, 2010 6:36 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks Terence, but my Photoshop Elements Albums are organized by a combination of date and topic (e.g. "2006: Christmas") so using the Photoshop Elements Organizer I can't easily find the underlying folders that the photos in an album are from, to be able to drag them anywhere.

Also, I tried just dragging an Album directly from the PSE Organizer into iPhoto, but it doesn't work -- it won't allow me to drop it there and it doesn't create an iPhoto album.

I think what I'm going to try next is creating keywords in PSE that match my Album names then exporting those keywords into the JPEG files. I believe iPhoto can read those tags on import of the files and I can re-create the albums manually. Still this is alot of work, and might be easier to just purchase the Mac version of PSE 9.

Lastly, I just remembered that PSE Organizer saves information about edited photos for me -- i.e. when I edited a file I only see the latest rev in the Organizer and the original files are hidden from view (they call it a "stack"). I doubt that iPhoto is going to recognize this, so I think I'm going to end up with duplicates of any photos that I edited.

Any ideas on how to avoid this without having to manually find all the edited files and archive them somehow?

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Answer 3

rcr2400

Level 1

0 points

Mar 11, 2011 7:55 PM in response to stillerz

Stillerz - Did you ever get this problem figured out. I have been wanting to switch over to iPhoto for years, but have too much time invested in my PSE Libary. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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Answer 4

Mar 12, 2011 5:35 PM in response to stillerz

I'm afraid you just can't do it. You can make tags for your album names and then write the keyword tags into the files before moving them to iphoto, and iphoto should pick those up as keywords, but that's as far as it goes when it comes to transferring PSE organization into another program, mac or windows (except sometimes lightroom).

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