Photoshop Elements

Well, I finally took the plunge - and upgraded my Photoshop Elements 3.0 (and Photoshop Album) to the new Photoshop Elements 6.0 (PSE6).

A few things caused the change:

• the old version was starting to creak a little bit
• lots of annoying little bits -like no alternative date format
• the ability to use star ratings
  
• the shiny new interface looked cool!

The upgrade went really well. As other people have noticed - you need to then manually go and convert your old catalogs using the "Catalog Manager" (File -> Catalogs ...).

One disappointment is that there (still) does not seem to be an adequate interface to Flickr. What is with the whole Adobe Partner Services thing? As such, in the past I've whipped up some Java to scan my PSE catalog (stored in an Access/Jet style) database, and reconcile that against my Flickr account - using the flickrj project as the framework.

One pleasant surprise is that the framework used to store the database has been updated. It now uses something called SQLite. This looks really interesting, as it is a well featured SQL database, which stores it's entire contents in a single file. (Apparently, Lightroom also uses SQLite, but I think a different schema.)

Naturally, I needed to check out the schema. Two ways spring to mind:

1. Native access - via the SQLite facilities
2. JDBC access.

A few little notes on each follow below.

Native SQLite Access

1. download the executable from here. This gives you a zip. Simply extract the contents - a single .exe to a location of your choice.
2. locate your PSE catalog location - an easy way is to use the Help -> System Info ... menu option.
3. use the command sqlite3 filename

This gives you a simple command line interface. The commands are all "." prefixed - for example, use ".help" to get started.

JDBC

There is a JDBC interface available. I decided to try the one available here. It was a simple matter of:

1. create an Eclipse project (or IDE of choice)
2. add the jar file to the class path
3. use the sample code to start exploring
   

It does seem very straightforward. I'll post some code, etc after a bit more digging.