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Note: The PSEtools script from alpenglow.info is copyright protected and licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs-Unported License version 3.0. Click here for more info.

Converting Lightroom/Bridge keywords to Photoshop Elements and vice versa

The Problem: Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge offer a hierarchy of keywords to tag your photos. Photoshop Element does as well. Although all are Adobe products, the file formats for transferring the keyword hierarchies are incompatible.

The Solution: I wrote a small command line tool that will convert the file formats into each other, read on to learn more.

My special thanks go to Dr. Ulrich Mäck, who in the first place is responsible for this little tool finally getting published, and who trusted me being able to get this done, providing me great and challenging test data on the way :-) !

Installation of “writeTags” on Windows

The little program is written in the Python programming language. In order to run my program, you will need to perform some simple steps:

  1. You need a working installation of Python 2.7. You can get it from www.python.org or directly with the Windows installer here: http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.1/python-2.7.1.msi.
  2. Additionally you will need to install the setuptools for Python, which you can get here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
  3. Download and run the Windows installer of the PSEtools you can download here: psetools-0.4.win32.exe

Installation of “writeTags” on Mac OS

The little program is written in the Python programming language. Even on a Mac, in order to run my program, you will need to perform some simple steps:

  1. You need a working installation of Python 2.7. You can get it from www.python.org. Follow the installation instructions there.
  2. Additionally you will need to install the setuptools for Python, which you can get here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
  3. Now download my psetools.egg, and store it in a location where you will find again.
  4. Open a command line and type (assuming e.g. you placed your Python into /opt/python/bin and the psetools.egg file into ~/writeTags): 
    ~/writeTags> easy_install psetools-0.4-py2.7.egg
  5. This will start a small download and install the program into the scripts directory of your Python 2.7.

Done!

Usage Instructions

If you managed the install the usage of the tool will be surprisingly simple ;-)

Photoshop Elements to Lightroom/Bridge

Converting the Photoshop Elements tags to use them in Adobe Lightroom/Bridge, assuming you have a tag file from Photoshop Elements called mypsetags.xml:

c:\psedata> c:\python2.7.1\scripts\writeTags.exe mypestags.xml converted

This will instruct the program to read the file mypsetags.xml and create three files called converted.xml, converted.txt, and converted.bridge.txt. Each of these files contains the same tag hierachy in a different format:

  • The converted.xml is another version of the PSE file – you can safely delete it as it will not contain the tags’ icons anyway.
  • The converted.txt is a simple text file in a file format suited for merging tag hierarchies – just concatenate multiple hierarchies in this format into a single file and run again through writeTags to get a combined file. Useful if you want to merge e.g. multiple different Lightroom keyword hierarchies.
  • The converted.bridge.txt finally is the file suited to be imported by Bridge’s “Import” command (again, to be found in a tiny drop down menu right above the Keyword tab). I suspect Lightroom has a similar menu somewhere, the file format is the same for Bridge and for Lightroom.

Done!

Lightroom/Bridge to Photoshop Elements

I’m sure you guessed it by now – just follow the instructions above in reverse order:

  1. Export your keywords using the “Export” menu in Lightroom
  2. Run the writeTags.exe with two parameters: First one is the file you just created, the second one the filename stub for the three output files that will be created.
  3. Pick the xml file create when importing using PSE’s “New… From File…” tag command.

Done!

How to get a tag file from Photoshop Elements

I actually didn’t know this for quite some time, but PSE can export the whole tag hierarchy conveniently into a file: Startup the Photoshop Elements organizer. The function to export the tags is located in the drop down menu called “New…” right above the tag tree. If you expand the menu you will find a menu item called “save tags to file” (or similar, I got a German PSE…).

  1. Call this function, select “All tags” or you can even limit the export to a certain subtree.
  2. Click Ok
  3. Browse to a suitable destination directory and enter the filename, e.g. mypsetags.xml, and click Ok.

Done!

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