Managing Catalogs
The Catalog Manager (Organizer | File | Manage Catalogs) is used for several tasks. These include the following:
- Create new catalogs.
- Rename existing catalogs.
- Convert a previous, older version of Elements catalogs to the new version of the software.
- Optimize a catalog—this helps reduce its size, making it more efficient.
It's quite important to ensure that your backed up catalog is saved to a location that is different to where the default catalog is stored. For most, this means saving it to an entirely different drive – in the following illustration, there are five different drives available for backup:
While a software-driven data backup is a good procedure to set up for all users, it might not back up your Photoshop Elements catalog. And even if it did, it wouldn't be in a format that Elements can recognize, should you need to restore it after a software mishap.
The catalog is where all your hard work is stored: tags, keywords, albums, captions, places...
