Organizer to Lightroom…Complete!

by Steve Eshom

When I originally started the conversion from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Lightroom I ran into a pretty big snag.  The snag was the captions from RAW images were not transferring into Lightroom when I used the Import from Elements feature.  Everything else imported just fine but not having my captions concerned me.

Since my January 1 attempt I’ve contemplated several workarounds to get the captions over.  My ideas were (in order of feasibility):

1.  Export the captions from Organizer and copy and paste them on each image in Lightroom
2.  Export the captions from Organizer and build .xmp sidecar files that could be read into Lightroom
3.  Wait until a later version of Lightroom and hope that caption transfer would be added
4.  Ignore the missing captions

I ruled out option 4 because I value my captions too much.  Option 3 was the plan I went with for some time but not having my catalog in Lightroom was becoming more and more difficult (mainly due to an import issue that raised its head in March).  That left me with options 1 & 2.

I experimented quite a bit with option 2 as it would make the caption import mechanical and eliminate potential errors.  I have been using Lightroom since the first Windows betas in June of 2006 so I had quite a few images that I’d edited already.  Those edits are valuable just like the captions and I wanted to make sure they were included in my new Railroad catalog.  To do this I wrote out .xmp sidecars containing the edit information.   Now I have a dilemma, some files would have two sidecar files.  That won’t work because Lightroom reads in the data in the sidecar file as a replacement for the data it has in the library.  This means when you read the side car file Lightroom overlays all the information on the image.  With two files I’d either get the edits or I’d get the captions but not both.  As much as I hated it, option 1 proved to be the most fool proof and accurate way of getting my captions into Lightroom.

The conversion 

After much grumbling about copy and paste I decided to make the leap and convert the catalog knowing I’d have a copy and paste job ahead.   Here’s the steps I performed to prepare.

In Organizer:

1.  I used the Write Tag Info to files feature to write what information I could to my image files.  This put the caption on about 1350 of my images that were originally .jpg, .tiff, or. psd
2.  I reconnected all missing files to make sure Organizer knew the location of all the images
3.  I recovered the catalog to compress it and make sure it is ready for Lightroom

In Lightroom:

1.  I selected all the images in the Library grid and went to the Metadata menu and chose Save Metadata to files (this is my ‘working’ catalog that did not contain any keywords, captions or anything, just edits).  This saved all the edits I’d made in Lightroom to xmp sidecar files
2.  I created a new catalog and chose Import from Elements.   This started the import process from my Organizer catalog

In less than an hour I had a Lightroom catalog minus captions from about 7950 images.

The clean up

The conversion process wasn’t perfect and I had many duplicate keywords.  As near as I could tell if an image was in a version set in Organizer the keywords were duplicated, one within the keyword hierarchy and one at the root of the hierarchy.  I checked several out and they were truly duplicates so all I had to do was remove the keywords that were not in the hierarchy and the keywords would all be correct.

As a double check that all of my photos were converted I went to each folder and imported all files from the folder.  I found about a dozen images that were not in organizer and thus were not converted to Lightroom.  In the end I wasn’t missing anything valuable, but it was nice to know everything had converted.

The clean up took between 3 and 4 hours total.

The captions

Thanks to Paige’s comments on the previous post I knew that the Organizer file could be opened by MS Access.  I decided to extract the captions from there into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of entry.  This is the query I used.

SELECT ImageTable.fImageOriginalFilePath,
       ImageTable.fImageOriginalFileName,
       ImageTable.fImageDate,
       ImageTable.fImageTime,
       MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaption,
       ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaption  FROM (ImageTable LEFT JOIN ImageLongCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fImageLongCaptionIdFromImage = ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaptionId)
                 LEFT JOIN MediaShortCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fMediaShortCaptionIdFromMedia = MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaptionId;

The results of this query were exported into Excel where I combined the short and long captions (I used both over the years) into one caption giving me something that looked like this:

The copy and paste

In both Lightroom and Excel I ordered the images by file name and went after it one image at a time.  What I quickly discovered is I tended to give blocks of images the same caption.  When you have a DSLR and blast off 10 images of the same train there really isn’t much different information from one image to the next.  I found I could apply the same caption to a block of images by selecting all the images in Lightroom and then pasting in the caption.  For example if you look at the Excel screen shot above you can see IMG_2347.CR2 - IMG_2350_edited-1.psd all have the same caption.  Instead of copying and pasting 7 times I can finish these images with just one copy and paste. 

In the end I captioned over 1000 images and hour.  With just under 7000 to caption that worked out to between 6 and 7 hours worth of effort.  I spread the effort out in small pieces so as to not kill myself.  I also intentionally didn’t set a deadline to complete this because with my personality if I did that I’d have to find some way to get it done before the deadline which would likely translate into some late night marathon.  

The reward

I’m now working exclusively in Lightroom and I don’t have any more copy and paste to do!  As nasty as it sounds the copy and paste wasn’t really that bad.  My decision to to a little here and there really made the job go quickly and took away the monotony that comes with a repetitive task.   Now that the hard work is over I can sit back and enjoy having a complete Lightroom catalog of my railroad photos.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.