The kindest thing I could possibly say is “there is potential for improvement”.
Earlier this year, I decided to quite Adobe Photoshop Elements, in favour of a photo-centric Adobe CS solution, containing Lightroom and Photoshop.
On the positive side: the capabilities of this suite, especially Lightroom, goes way beyond what you can do with Photoshop Elements. Lightroom is still da bomb. That’s worth a lot.
I expected the import facility, allowing you to import a Photoshop Elements Organizer catalog into a Lightroom catalog, to actually work. Which then, and now, doesn’t sound like an unreasonable expectation. Little did I know…
It started with Lightroom’s import facility allowing us to import all Elements Organizer catalogs up to and including version 21. Which was a bit… sad, because my catalog was version 25.
So I turned to Adobe Customer Support. This was in May 2025.
They started out telling me that all I had to do was rename the lr25cat.db to lr21cat.db, and proceed from there, and they were happy to demonstrate that in a remote support session.
This resulted in the catalog only partially being imported. With “partially” I mean “less than 30% of the photos made it through”. And the worst part is, there was no telling which photos were omitted. This resulted in the incident being escalated to a higher level.
The higher-level support engineer who picked it up, started to tell me exactly what I was told in the first session. I told him that, but he insisted I must have done something wrong. When I informed him that it was the lower-tier engineer who had done it, he did not waver.
So I let him go ahead, we opened a new remote session, and he started to do the same thing: rename the lrcat25.db file to lrcat21.db, and started to import that. It happily imported 6500 photos and our support engineer triumphantly chirped “see?”
When I showed him inside Elements Organizer that the catalog he tried to import had over 21000 photos, he sounded considerably less triumphant. He tried the same thing a few more times… and each time, a different number of photos were imported, but he never got over 7k.
But it gets worse. The incident was abandoned; I didn’t hear anything for over two weeks. So I gave them a ring.
The engineer who answered was, in fact, the same guy I spoke to during my first call. Good, I thought, he’ll know about it.
Wrong. He approached it in exactly the same way. I tried to remind him that I had raised this issue earlier, and that he would be able to find that incident under my account.
He did not. So I let him. Again, resulting in an incomplete import, and that I would be contacted by his manager.
This bounced back and forth a couple times. The incident was abandoned a few times again; they probably hoped that I would just go away or something.
I didn’t. In September, I raised the issue for the fourth time.
I quickly got escalated to a seemingly more senior engineer this time.
Now, it just so happens that, before I retired, I had accumulated a lot of experience with coding data migrations. I also firmly believed (and still do) in proper logging (as Jan, who will no doubt read this, will gladly confirm). I really believe that, if you cannot import an object, you should write that out in an error log, including the object’s identity, and including the exception with the stack trace, so that the source of the problem can be identified.
Or, at the very least, if you refuse to acknowledge the problem, the user can figure out which photos should be imported separately.
The engineer I spoke to acknowledged the merit of this approach, and would take it up with his contact.
The next month (yes, I hear you cry), I got an email stating that they were abandoning the case altogether because they said it couldn’t be done. They now said my Elements Organizer catalog was corrupt — even though, during one of the support sessions, Organizer itself, on doing a database consistency check, said absolutely nothing was wrong with it before their very eyes.
Six months after I first reported the problem, mind you.
So, I wrote a message to give them a piece of my mind, and to explain how I, if I were assigned to writing a converter, I’d address the logging.
They apologized in typically Oriental fashing, and promised they’d reopen the incident and contact me.
It is now November 29.
I have lost the ability to believe this is actually going to happen.
