Convert: Photoshop Album to IMatch

Importing from Adobe Photoshop Album 1 / 2

Having decided that continuing on the Photoshop Album path would be a mistake, I sought out ways that I might somehow transfer all of the tagging of photos to the new tool. Re-tagging over ten thousand photos was already out of the question. Transfering this tagging work (not only the tags / categories, but also the list of tags applied to each photo) is generally a two-step process. The source tool (Photoshop Album in this case) needs to have some way to export the database into a known intermediate format (generally text-file based). The destination tool (IMatch) needs to provide some means to importing the intermediate formate into its own database format.

Fortunately, IMatch provides an excellent scripting engine that will allow the second step (importing) to be done with great ease. The first step (exporting from Photoshop Album) is much more difficult, but there is a tool that one can use to accomplish this task.

An extremely useful utility written by Brad Schick, called PSATool, will let you export a Photoshop Album 2 catalog into a text file. Note that for Photoshop Album 1 users, the free Photoshop Album 2 Starter Edition is available on the Adobe web site: Photoshop Album 2 SE. Installing this version will allow you to convert your existing Photoshop Album 1 database into Album 2 database format, which can then be used by these scripts.

Please see the author's page at: PSATool. A copy of the tool has been saved here: psatools.zip

Once the text file has been created (according to the directions shown below) with PSATool, one can then use the PSA2IMATCH script, which can be found on the Yahoo IMatch User Forum in the Files directory. A version of the script has been saved here at: PSA2Imatch-08APR2004.zip

It is important to read the documentation with the PSA2Imatch script (seen within the source code for the script) to determine what command line options should be used for the PSATool script. In essense, it recommends using the following command line options:

psatool /if-print /tp /fp /uf /ss My-Catalog.psa >c:\PSA-export.txt

To run the above utility, you will need to open a DOS shell / command prompt. In Windows XP, select Start->Run.... Then type in cmd into the Open: field and click on OK. Change to the directory (cd c:\directory) containing the psatool executable and type in the above command.

Note that some modification of the PSA2IMatch script needs to be done to match your current setup (eg. the BASE_CAT and PSA_FILE constants).

It is also important to ensure that the PSA2IMatch script matches the proper version of PSATool. In my case, the import script (PSA2IMatch) did not work, and gave an error message indicating that the file was not of the expected format.

To fix this, I added four lines to the script as shown below:

...

' read the first 3 lines and check for consistency
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
	
'CAL! *** START OF ADDED SECTION ***
'CAL!
'CAL!   The following four lines were added to match
'CAL!   the my version of the PSATool.
'CAL!
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
If Not EOF(1) Then Line Input #1, textLine
'CAL! *** END OF ADDED SECTION ***

If (textLine <> "File Name;Id;Type;State;Date;Caption;Folders") Then

...

Once the scripts were configured correctly, it took less than an hour to convert my entire Photoshop Album database into IMatch!