A couple of years ago I started having a lot of problems a lot with PSE & its catalogs. This only got worse when I upgraded to newer versions. As a precaution against loosing data I saved all of the catalogs. Things have settled down a little with the current version I'm using PSE 11 although I can't get all of my tags for people places & events to be displayed correctly.
Yesterday I ran a duplicated file program on the drive that had all of the old catalog's & it said that I had as many as 4 copies of some pictures which are said to be identical. There are supposed to be up to 15000 duplicates. My problem now is can this be believed& should I just delete the 'duplicates' or am I risking something that I can't recover?
Do the programs that look for duplicates all use the exact same criteria so that they should all produce the same results?
I would assume that the pictures that were taken with digital cameras in more recent times would all have an EXIF data still embedded in them. Is this correct or does PSE strip this from the actual pictures & just somehow link any data to the catalog someway?
As for pictures that I had scanned I had added date taken (where known) as well a tagging them with names people & events.
The pictures were stored in a tree structure with pictures located in files labelled, country,state, event etc. Much of this appears to have been lost & I'm aware that many people recommend now that all picture just be placed in one folder is this correct?
Can 2 copies of pictures be 'identical' & still have PSE treat them differently?
Could I just delete all catalogs including the current one & then the PSE to do a search for pictures on my hard drives? What would I end up with?
Any help in this regard would be much appreciated.