Photo Gallery Migration

[Aaron Kelley]

Looking to migrate the Windows Photo Gallery library information from one
Vista machine to another. Specifically, I am looking to migrate tag and
date/time info from one machine to another (so I will not have to input it
all again).

Most of the information is saved inside the photos themselves - i.e., for
..JPGs, I can just dump them into the Pictures folder on the new machine and
Windows Photo Gallery will recognize them and automatically build a list of
tags.

However, some other files (videos, .PNGs) do not have tag and time/date
taken info stored in the files themselves. Windows Photo Gallery stores
this information in its own little database. This is what I want to move to
the new machine, without having to tag everything over again.

Making an attempt to figure it out myself, I found that the database is
stored in your profile folder - AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo
Gallery\Pictures.pd4 - but, just moving this file to the other machine does
not work. Windows Photo Gallery recognizes the tags and photos instantly if
you do this, but it complains that your pictures folder is not found. If
you locate it, then all of a sudden you have duplicates of every picture,
and if you tell it not to worry about it, all of the pictures go away.


So, I am wondering if anyone knows of a supported way to migrate this
information. I searched around online for a while, and nothing useful
popped up.


Thanks,
- Aaron
--

 

[John Inzer]

Looking to migrate the Windows Photo Gallery library information from
one Vista machine to another. Specifically, I am looking to migrate
tag and date/time info from one machine to another (so I will not
have to input it all again).

Most of the information is saved inside the photos themselves - i.e.,
for .JPGs, I can just dump them into the Pictures folder on the new
machine and Windows Photo Gallery will recognize them and
automatically build a list of tags.

However, some other files (videos, .PNGs) do not have tag and
time/date taken info stored in the files themselves. Windows Photo
Gallery stores this information in its own little database. This is
what I want to move to the new machine, without having to tag
everything over again.
Making an attempt to figure it out myself, I found that the database
is stored in your profile folder - AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows
Photo Gallery\Pictures.pd4 - but, just moving this file to the other
machine does not work. Windows Photo Gallery recognizes the tags and
photos instantly if you do this, but it complains that your pictures
folder is not found. If you locate it, then all of a sudden you have
duplicates of every picture, and if you tell it not to worry about
it, all of the pictures go away.

So, I am wondering if anyone knows of a supported way to migrate this
information. I searched around online for a while, and nothing useful
popped up.


Thanks,
- Aaron

=================================
Two dumb questions...but hey...I'm old.

Is the path to the pictures folder on the target
computer exactly the same as the source computer?

Before pasting the .pd4 file from the source
computer into the Windows Photo Gallery folder
on the target computer...did you delete or rename
the existing .pd4 file?

--

John Inzer
Digital Media MVP

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk

 

[Aaron Kelley]

Yes, the path is the same.

I backed up the existing .pd4 file before I replaced it, so that I could
revert if something didn't act right. (Which was the case, so I did
revert.)