fordie’s blog

I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop Album for quite some time now; I have somewhere in the region of four or five thousand photos “tagged”. If you haven’t used tried it it’s worth a look you can download the “starter edition” free from the Adobe site.

Photoshop Album has a number of features but the main thing I use it for is keeping my photos organised. You create your own “Tags” within PSA these are a short description that you apply to your photos. The tags can be anything you want, but PSA ships with a number of categories that the suggest you use for your tags, People and Places for example.

You can add multiple tags to your pictures and then search through your photos based on the tags you have added; so if I want to find all the photos of Laura and Isla together I click on the Laura and Isla tags and PSA displays all the photos of the two women in my life.

Having spent many hours adding tags to Photoshop Album I was keen not to loose that information when I moved my photos to my new network hard drive, so I set about finding a way to keep it, and better yet share the tags across the network.

First I copied the photos from my computer’s hard drive onto the network hard drive. I copied everything under “My Pictures” to “E:/Photos”.
The next thing to do was to find where PSA was storing the Catalogue, to do this open PSA and click on “help > system info” You should see this screen:

Note the location and name of the catalog. I copied the Catalog file and renamed the copy My Catalog.mdb. This allows you to edit the file with Microsoft Access.

Open the database and look for the table called “ImageTable”; do a find and replace on “fImageOriginalFilePath” and “fMediaFullPath” replace the files original location with the new location, e.g. Find “C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\My Documents\My Pictures” replace with “E:\photos”.

Close the database and change the extension back to .psa then copy your altered catalog onto the network drive. I copied mine to “E:\Adobe\PSA\”.

Next we need to change where PSA looks for it’s catalog. Click on the start button then “run” in the text box type “regedit” and press enter. The registry editor will open. Press F3 in the “Find what:” box type the old path to your catalog (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Album\Catalogs\).
Under “Look At” uncheck “keys” then click on find. The registry editor will find two or three entries with this value; when you find one double click on it and change the value to the new location of your .psa file. Press F3 to search again until all entries in the registry are replaced.

If you are planning to install PSA on more than one machine you will need to repeat the registry editing on each machine once you have installed PSA.

You can now open Photoshop Album, it will now be looking at the shared area on your network.

Note: This method does have limitations you will *probably* only be able to access PSA from one machine at a time.