I'm using Photoshop Elements 10 and also the Organizer part - a lot.
I have added captions to 23,000 pictures and now I am considering changing to Lightroom. Is it possible to migrate and still keep all my captions as part of the pictures - not only as metadata?
You are confusing a type of data with a storage location.
Metadata is "data about data." The picture information is your data, the caption is metadata.
Metadata such as captions can be saved in one of three locations- part of the photo file itself, in a secondary, linked (sidecar) file, or in either a system-level or application-level database. Which one(s) are used depends on the file type and application settings.
As an example, a JPEG file would typically store metadata in the file itself and/or a database. But a RAW file would store metadata in a sidecar file and/or a database.
Check the Elements and Lightroom documentation to see how to control where metadata is stored.
As Dan said, I'm not sure either what you mean by captions, but if you mean that you've used elements to add captions then they should be saved as metadata and it seems that lightroom can upgrade the elements catalog and preserve metadata - hope this helps
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/help/import-photos-various-sources.html
Simple, if the caption description is written inside files metadata you will preserve the caption, if it's inside Elements database you will not have it.
Try this; Save a file to Desktop, and import it to Lightroom. After import, look at Library under Metadata, if the description & caption are viewable then your metadata is written inside every single file.
