Casa Jonsson

I manage Casa Jonsson’s digital photos using a great little software product called Photoshop Album. It’s a good thing, but I do have one major gripe about the program: the way it deals with pictures stored on volumes that may not be connected to the computer all the time, such as external hard disks. If a picture in the catalog cannot be found, it is marked “disconnected” and must be individually reconnected in PSA. This is a real pain if, like us, you have 3,500 digital photos on a volume that isn’t an internal hard disk.

Some months ago I bought a Maxtor 120-GB external hard drive for photo storage because I was quickly outgrowing my internal hard disk. The first headache was getting PSA to find all my pictures after I had moved them to the new disk. Thankfully, PSA’s catalog file is actually an Access database, so the solution was relatively painless for a nerd:

1. Create a copy of the catalog using the file extension .mdb instead of .psa.
2. Open the .mdb file in Access.
3. Run an SQL UPDATE statement to change the full paths of all my pictures from
   C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\…
   to
   X:\My Pictures\…
   (X being the drive letter of my new external drive).
4. Swap out my catalog file for the altered one, renaming it .psa.

Having solved the problem of disconnected pictures once, it didn’t occur to me that I might have to go through this process again. I launched PSA, forgetting to power on and connect my external drive first. All my pictures were disconnected again.

I got tired of having to remember to power on and connect my external drive first, so I wrote a quick-and-dirty program that checks for the presence of the external drive before launching PSA. It works pretty well. You’re welcome to use it yourself. Source code is included.