How can I recover my Catalog?

I lost my hard drive and my backup drives.?I paid to have my hard drive recovered to a new external drive. I have purchased a new PC and reinstalled Photshop Elements 7.0.?I recovered my pictures.?How can I copy my catalog files from the data they restored for me to my new PC??What are the files I need to copy and where are they??I have 7 years worth of data.?Any help would be appreciated.

How can I recover my Catalog?

If you were using PSE7 before the crash, your catalog file(s) are *.pse7db. Search for those and copy them to the new PC.

As long as we're on the subject, you are going to start making regular backups of your photos and catalog file now, aren't you? You narrowly missed losing all your pictures this time; don't get caught without backups again.

How can I recover my Catalog?

Excellent, thank you so much.?Yes I will be doing regular backups.?I actually had two Maxtor External hard drives backing up my PC and both went within 5 weeks.?Then while following the instructions from Seagate to diagnose my external drive絧roblems, I took a head crash on my C:絛rive.?Gillware recovered it at a reasonable price.

Thanks again, I絯ill work on it tonight.

So far I have not found anything searching on *.pse7db or *. pse *db.?I had version 5 before I upgraded to 7.?I first started searching in my Photoshop Elements 7.0 folder, but now I am searching my entire drive.?Any suggestions?

I don't have PSE7 so I don't know where the file is stored. It might also depend on your operating system. Someone else probably can tell you, or it may be that you have to search Adobe's web site.

See this tech note for locations of the PSE 7 catalog:

http://go.adobe.com/kb/ts_kb404990_en-us

Make sure that you've configured Windows Explorer to show hidden files.

Thank you very much.?The information you provided me, allowed me to locate my catalog file in紺:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Catalogs on my recovered drive.?I did not expect it to be in 'all users' .?The catalog file name is My Catalog. psa .?I have copied it to the same folder on my new PC.?I絘m making good progress, but still絟aving some issues.I will work on it tomorrow, and絟ope to get them all絯orked out.?Thanks again!

Thank you!?It worked.?In my first attempt, I went絫o the wrong location and copied my old Catalog from Version 5 of Photoshop 紼lements.?I read all of the instructions carefully this morning, and discovered that Version 7 stored the紺atalog in a different location.?Therefore I went to 紺:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\ Photoshop Elements \Catalogs\My Catalog and copied everything絠n My Catalog,給n my recovered drive, to the same location on my new PC.?I opened Photoshop Elements 7, and it worked.?All of my Catalog entries, Tags, etc. were there.?Case closed.?It is easy when you do it right.?Thanks again.?This is my first experience using a forum and it was a life saver.

One other mistake I made was絚hoosing a different account name on my new PC.Because the account name is part of the path,絝or example C:\Documents and Settings\Karl Johnson\My Documents\My Pictures, I had to go back to my old account name.?(I thought I would shorten it from Karl Johnson to Karl but I had to change it back.)