My elderly mother uses Elements 6 on Vista to manage her several thousand photos. She is not very computer literate, but manages well enough, editing photos and putting them in mails and documents (word/publisher). Photos are added normally by connecting the camera via USB and letting Elements import them. Sometime she scans documents into Elements too. She not infrequently complains of photos disappearing altogether or of them becoming 'missing' ie. Elements cannot find the underlying file.
I maintain the computer remotely (from a different continent) using LogMeIn and know little of Elements. On trying to help look for missing photos, I noticed that rather than all photos being in her 'Pictures' directory, there are also photos spread around in other 'Documents' subdirecories. There are even one or two that seem to be in the 'Recycle Bin'. When I ask Elements to look for missing photos it searches all over the place, even going so far as the Guest account!
As my mother does not know enough to have decided to spread the photos around like this, I guess it must be Elements. The only thing that I can think of is that dragging a photo from Elements to, say a Word document, manages to move the underlying files in Elements. But that seems an odd thing for the program to do on purpose.
Can anyone shed any light on this puzzle please? How does it happen? How can it be stopped?
I understand that there is a newer version of Elements but am reluctant to upgrade for fear of losing all of the tags/albums etc that are associated with the photos. Can anyone offer any advise on the likelyhood of an upgrade going smoothly?