Scripts/PSE4Update
I have found PSE4 a useful tool for working with digital images. As usual, I wanted to change the way it worked. I have a group of photos and wanted to create a slide show showing the pictures with their names so that the recipient could select one or more pictures by name for printing while watching the slide show.
The only way I found to add text to a slide show in PSE4 was to type in the text I wanted as a "caption" for the picture. I didn't want to type in several hundred file names as captions, so I turned to J.
I had already discovered that PSE4 Organizer files were Access databases with a .psa extension. I also had discovered I could use J ODBC to access them by creating an Access Data Source name for them and using the "dd" script.
The result is this script. It requires that you select the PSE4 database with a data source name of PSE2. Then, run the verb fixpics. This will scan the database for images, determine which ones do not already have captions and add the file name as a caption.
You will want to back up your database before doing this.
Well, I upgraded to PSE7 and discovered that Adobe had changed the database architecture at some point. My PSE4 script no longer worked.
Adobe is now using SQLite databases and a more complex structure. But, with a bit of research, I was able to create a new script to update the PSE7 photo entries with captions based on their file names.
The process is a bit different. I mass selected all the pictures I wanted to add captions to in PSE7 and added a dummy caption.
Then, I ran the J script, which finds all images with captions and replaces the captions with the file names.
This still works well to create a slide show with imbedded file names using PSE7.