PS Photo Album 5 can't see path to images

[okonemoretime]

I suspect this is the wrong forum for this topic, but I could not find a more appropriate location (perhaps a moderator will move the post for me).

I have a paid copy of Jasc Paint Shop Album 5, in which I created several collections of images and spent a LOT of time tagging them. That was two hard-drive crashes ago.

The program files were copied to a CD, and today I copied them to my new Windows 7 computer. I am able to open PS Album 5 and observe that the Collections are intact, and the images are still associated with their various keywords.

The problem is that the program does not see the correct path to the files and therefore cannot display the thumbnails or open the images. This is because Windows has changed the path to My Documents.

Formerly, it was
c:\documents and settings\my name\my documents\[folder name]

Now it's
c:\users\owner\documents\[folder name]

There is no option for right-clicking and assigning a new path to a Collection. I thought a solution might be to create a new folder under c:\ with the old path and then copy the image folder there, but of course, Windows won't allow us to use back slashes for folder names.

Obviously, I could create new (duplicates, actually) Collections and bring the images in, but I am fairly certain the tags would not "stick" with the images. Re-tagging these images would require having the hundreds of small objects they represent physically at my desk to be examined all over again (not easy!).

Maybe there's a solution to this that I'm just not thinking of. Please post any ideas.

Thanks very much.

[hartpaul]

Can you open Photo Album 5 and create a mini collection and save it.
Then navigate to the location where that is saved and replace it with the contents of your other collection.

I am worried about your statement:

The program files were copied to a CD, and today I copied them to my new Windows 7 computer.

I hope you mean Data files here rather than program files - the program files are the ones placed during installation with links to registry entries.
Just copying the program files does not add the registry links.
You may have to install the program on your Win 7 computer.

[LindaSue]

Have you tried creating your own "c:\documents and settings\my name\my documents\[folder name]" folders and path and put your photos in there? Since your current version of Windows doesn't contain a folder by that name you should be able to do that.

[okonemoretime]

Can you open Photo Album 5 and create a mini collection and save it.
Then navigate to the location where that is saved and replace it with the contents of your other collection.

I am worried about your statement:

The program files were copied to a CD, and today I copied them to my new Windows 7 computer.

I hope you mean Data files here rather than program files - the program files are the ones placed during installation with links to registry entries.
Just copying the program files does not add the registry links.
You may have to install the program on your Win 7 computer.

I'll try what you suggest tomorrow (no time just now).

Yeah, I, too, was surprised by the fact that the exe file actually ran the program. But there it is..........or is it? The thumbnails are just gray squares with faint Xs in the centers and the file names at the top. If the program isn't actually installed on my new computer, could that explain why it's not "seeing" the images? If it's not installed, would it still open? Would the menus and tabs work? Right now, I'm running it from a flash drive (copied from the CD). Does my copy of PaintShop Pro include files the Photo Album "borrows" in order to run??? I'll copy the flash drive files to the new computer and see what happens. I don't even know if the folder should be placed directly under C:\ or within Program Files (x86)\Jasc Software Inc.

Is PS Photo Album 5 (or any versions) still available?

Thanks.

[okonemoretime]

Well, the answer to whether I can create a new Collection and save it is................I totally don't know.

I did create a new Collection and named it, but where it's saved -- IF it's saved -- is a mystery. The images show in the upper (Collections) and lower (Folder on my computer) panes, and the name is on the list of Collections at the left menu, and I can add/edit/assign keywords, but where that new Collection is saved I cannot say.

I can't find any folders in the program's files that contain anything with a name that matches any of the Collections I've created.

Here's a screenshot (I obscured names of other Collections):
http://postimg.org/image/ehqn8g7rn/88ce00b0/

[okonemoretime]

I found the installation CD and installed the program on the new Win 7 computer. No saved Collections upon opening PS Photo Album (no surprise there),
but the program behaves exactly as it did when all I did was copy the files from the old to the new pc.

Then I pasted in the old program files from the flash drive (over-copied everything), and I'm back where I was before -- the Collections are there (with the exception of the newly-created "mini" test Collection because that wasn't on the flash drive), but like before, the thumbnails aren't being displayed (X on a gray square) because PS Photo Album doesn't know the path. If I could determine what path these Collections use to find the images, I could just copy the images there, but........

Adding a duplicate of one of the images to the Collection does allow its thumbnail to be displayed (so now the Collection has two images with the same name -- seems like the program ought to prevent that), but thumbnail2 has no keywords associated with it, whereas thumbnail1 (gray X) does.

Another thing noted: the folder named PaintShopPhotoAlbumCache now contains hundreds of files named [series of four digits].pspathm, whereas prior to installing from the CD, there were only four. I don't know the significance of this.

So at this point, I still can't see any way to get PS Photo Album to see the path to the images. I've got image names and their keywords, and it seems like my only option might be to look at every single thumbnail, copy down what its keywords are, and then tediously recreate them in a new Collection. Boy do I wish there were some other way!

Thanks.