The Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of the projects that involve sharing images with others (like posting them online, for example). You can see thumbnails of all your photos in the Organizer, assign them keywords (called tags) to make them easier to find, and search for them in lots of different ways. If you have a Photoshop.com account (Photoshop.com), that site also includes a version of the Organizer that works just the way it does on your desktop.
The Media Browser is the Organizer’s main window. Date view (go to Display→Date View, or press Ctrl+Alt+D/Option-⌘-A) is an alternate, calendar-based way of looking at and searching for photos, as explained in Figure 2-9. But the Media Browser is more versatile: It’s your main Organizer workspace, which is what the rest of this section is about.
Figure 2-9. Date view offers you the same menu options as the main Media Browser window, but instead of a contact sheet–like view of your photos, your images are laid out on a calendar. Click a date (here, November 1 is selected), and in the upper-right corner of the screen, you can view or advance through a slideshow of that day’s pictures by using the controls circled here. Date view is fun and sometimes handy for searching, but it doesn’t offer many useful features that aren’t also in the Media Browser.
The Organizer stores information about your photos in a special database called a catalog. You don’t have to do anything special to create your catalog—Elements creates it automatically the first time you import photos (and creatively names it My Catalog). It’s possible to have more than one catalog, but most people don’t because you can’t search more than one catalog at a time. If you really want to have more than one catalog, or if you ever want to start over with a new catalog, in the Organizer go to File→Catalog, and then click the New button. Enter a name for it and then click OK.
Your catalog can include photos stored anywhere on your computer, and even photos that you’ve moved to external hard drives and CDs or DVDs. There aren’t any limits on where you can keep your originals. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. But in practice, Elements sometimes has a tough time finding files stored on network drives and other externals, so you may run into trouble if you want Elements to find photos you’ve saved on such devices. (The Mac Organizer, in particular, can’t deal with network drives at all, although it should see removable drives, like FireWire or USB drives.)
Once your photos appear in the Organizer, if you want to move them, you have to use the Organizer to do that—as opposed to using another method like Windows Explorer—if you want the Organizer to know where they are. You aren’t limited to photos, either—you can store videos and audio files in the Organizer as well.
Tip
If you want to edit photos in programs other than Elements, the Organizer lets you do that. Just go to Edit→Preferences→Editing→Supplementary Editing Application and select your preferred program. (If you have Photoshop installed on your computer, it’s automatically listed as an editing option.) This is handy if you want to supplement Elements with a program like Paint Shop Pro or Pixelmator.
Although the Media Browser (Figure 2-10) may look a little intimidating at first, it’s really quite logical. By using its different menu options, you can import photos; print, edit, and share them; create projects; and customize your view. The Media Browser displays thumbnails of all your images in the main part of the window (sometimes called the image well).
Tip
In some previous versions of Elements, the Media Browser was called the Photo Browser, in case you run across that term in any tutorials. Adobe changed the name to reflect the fact that now it’s also meant for use with their Premiere Elements video-editing program, too. You may see lots of references to Premiere Elements in the Organizer’s menus. If you don’t use Premiere Elements, you can get rid of most of them by going to the Organizer and choosing Edit→Preferences→Editing, and turning off the “Show Premiere Elements Editor Options” checkbox.
Figure 2-10. The Media Browser is your main Organizer workspace. Click the divider (circled, left) to hide or show the Organize bin (the cursor morphs into a double-headed arrow when you’re in the correct spot for clicking). If you want to change the way your photos are sorted, click the Display menu in the upper-right corner (circled, top).
On the right side of the Media Browser is the Task pane, which you also see in the Editor. It has the same Create and Share tabs as in the Editor, and two tabs unique to the Organizer. The first is the Organize tab, which is home to the Organize bin, where you tag (label) your photos with keywords to make them easier to find. (Tagging is probably the first thing you’ll want to do to your photos in the Organizer; you’ll learn how to tag in the next section.) You can also group your photos together into collections, called albums, here (see The Media Browser). To the right of the Organize tab is the Fix tab, where you can choose to send your photos over to the Editor or to another editing program to work on them, or apply many basic quick fixes (see The Quick Fix Window).
If you’d like to see both the pictures and the folders where they’re stored, go to Display→Folder Location. A new pane appears on the left side of the Media Browser showing the folders on your computer. If you click a thumbnail when you’re in Folder Location view, the Folders pane shows you exactly where the current batch of photos lives. Click a folder’s icon to see its photos displayed in the image well.
Tip
If you’ve used early versions of the Organizer and you miss the Timeline, go to Window→Timeline or press Ctrl+L/⌘-L to bring back your old friend. For folks new to Elements, the Timeline is explained on Using Tags and Categories to Find Photos.
You can also move your photos directly in the Folders pane by dragging them. Moving your photos this way is better than moving them by using, say, Windows Explorer or the Finder on a Mac, because it lets Elements keep track of where your photos are (Figure 2-11). But Folder Location view can be rather buggy, so your best bet is to just stop worrying about where your images are and to let the Organizer figure that out for you.
Figure 2-11. If you want to move photos around on your computer after you’ve brought them into the Organizer, you can drag them within this pane of the Media Browser, but it’s safer to go to File→Move instead, since Folder Location view has a number of quirks and bugs. If you move photos around when you’re not in the Organizer, Elements can’t easily find them. If Elements loses track of a photo, you can use the Reconnect command (File→Reconnect) to help Elements find it again.
One of the handiest features in the Organizer is Full Screen view. Once you get your photos into the Organizer, go to Display→“View, Edit, Organize in Full Screen” (keyboard shortcut: F11/⌘-F11) or “Compare Photos Side by Side” (F12/⌘-F12) to see a larger, slideshow-like view of your photos (either singly or in pairs, depending on the option you select) so you can pick the ones you want to print or edit. You can even choose music to accompany them. (If you don’t want anything that elaborate, just double-click a thumbnail in the Media Browser to see your photo enlarged to fit the available space. Double-click it again to go back to thumbnail view.)
Elements also lets you apply many quick editing commands right in Full Screen or Side by Side view (see Full Screen View). Just hover your cursor over the Quick Edit panel on the left side of your screen, and it pops out to give you access to all the one-button fixes available in the Editor’s Quick Fix mode (Adding Canvas). You can also rate your photos here (People Recognition) by using the stars at the top of the panel. The Quick Organize panel (also on the left side of the screen) lets you apply keyword tags in Tag Cloud view (Working with tags and categories), or put your photos into albums (The Media Browser).
Tip
The Organizer’s Quick Edit and Quick Organize panels close back up each time a new image appears onscreen. If you want a panel to stay open, click the tiny pushpin icon on its right edge. To get rid of a panel entirely, click the Close button (the X in Windows, the dot on a Mac). To bring it back, use the controls at the bottom of the screen, which are described in detail on Full Screen View.
You can even use Full Screen view as a quick slideshow to show off your latest images—see Full Screen View to learn how. To get back to the regular Media Browser view, press Esc.
The Organizer has a great system for quickly finding photos, but it works only if you use special keywords, called tags, that the Organizer uses to track down your pictures. A tag can be a word, a date, or even a rating (as explained in the box on Special Tags). When you import photos to the Organizer, they’re automatically tagged with the import date and any other tags you’ve specified in the Photo Downloader—see The Photo Downloader). But you may want to add more tags to make it easier to search for the subject of the photo later on. You can give a photo as many tags as you like.
Elements lets you group tags into categories. You get a few preset categories—like People, Places, and Events—and you can create your own, as well as make subcategories. For example, you can make a Vacations category with China Trip and Cozumel as subcategories. Your photos in those categories could have tags like “Jim and Helen,” “silk factory,” or “snorkeling.”
Elements gives you a few generic tags to help get you started, but you’ll want to learn how to create your own tags, too. After all, by the time you’ve got 5,000 or so photos in the Organizer, searching for “Family” probably isn’t going to narrow things down much.
Creating a new tag is as easy as can be:
Just type it. In the Organize bin (The Media Browser), go to the box at the bottom of the Keyword Tags panel and start typing. At first you see a pop-up menu of all the existing tags, but if you keep typing, once Elements recognizes it as a new tag, the pop-up changes to say “Create new tag ‘<text of your new tag>’.” Select the photo(s) you want to apply this new tag to and then click Apply. Elements puts tags created this way in the Other category. To put it somewhere else, drag the tag’s icon to the category where it belongs.
Keyboard shortcut. When you’re in the Organizer, press Ctrl+N/⌘-N.
Menu. In the Organize bin’s Keyword Tags panel, click New (the green + sign)→New Keyword Tag. (You can also create a new category or subcategory via this same menu.)
When you create tags using either of the last two methods, the Create Keyword Tag dialog box appears. Name the new tag by typing it in, and then assign it to a category using the drop-down menu. (You can change the category later if you want.) No matter which method you use, you can also edit the tag’s icon, as explained in Figure 2-12.
To assign the tag to a photo, simply drag the tag’s icon from the Organize bin onto the photo’s thumbnail.
Tip
If you’re looking for the Tag Cloud view from Elements 9, it’s only available in Elements 10’s Full Screen view (Full Screen view), where you can select tags from the cloud and apply them to photos, but not use them as the basis for a search.
You can rearrange tags by dragging them in the Organize bin, and change tags to categories and categories to tags by right-clicking them and choosing from the pop-up menu. You can also drag tags from one category to another in the Organize bin.
Figure 2-12. Some people like to edit the icons that Elements uses to represent different tags to make it easy to search for a tag visually as well as by name. To change the picture associated with a tag, right-click/Control-click the tag in the Organize bin’s Keyword Tags panel, and then choose “Edit <name of tag> keyword tag.” In the Edit Keyword Tag dialog box that appears, click Edit Icon and Elements opens the dialog box shown here. The arrows on either side of the Find button let you advance through all the photos that use that tag. (If you click the Find button, you see all those photos at once.) Or click the Import button to use a different image stored on your computer. Once you select the picture you want, drag the dotted square to choose which part of your photo appears on the tag.
To remove a tag you’ve assigned:
From a single photo. Right-click/Control-click the photo’s thumbnail and select “Remove Keyword Tag→<name of tag>.”
From a group of photos. Select the photos, right-click/Control-click one of them, select “Remove Keyword Tag from Selected Items,” and then choose the tag you want to remove.
Note
At the bottom of the Keyword Tags panel is a category called Smart Tags. The Organizer includes a feature called the Auto Analyzer that can evaluate your photos and videos and pass judgment on them and assign corresponding Smart Tags, like High Quality or Blurred. Fortunately, if you only install Photoshop Elements, the Auto Analyzer is turned off unless you deliberately start it, but if you also have Premiere Elements on your computer, it’s turned on automatically. In that case, disabling it should be one of the first things you do in Elements. Why? Because the Auto Analyzer is a real resource hog and it’s very hard to remove a Smart Tag once the Auto Analyzer has applied it. Besides, for still photos, all it can do is evaluate blur, brightness and contrast, and really, can’t you tell that yourself? Go to Edit→Preferences→Media-Analysis to shut it off.
One interesting feature in Elements is face recognition, which was introduced in Elements 8. In earlier versions of the program, you could tell the Organizer to find all the people in your photos, but that was as far as it went: the Organizer presented you with everything it thought looked like a human face, and it was up to you to sort it out. Now, the Organizer finds faces and you help it out at first by naming the people it finds. After that, it should be able to automatically recognize and tag Cousin Serafina and Great Uncle William in future photos without you having to identify them.
Tip
While People Recognition is only meant to work with human faces, you can use the new Object search or the Visual Similarity search to find all the photos of pets, your new car, and so on. Searching by Metadata explains how.
To get started:
Choose the photos you want Elements to analyze.
Select them in the Media Browser.
Tell Elements to start evaluating them.
In the Organize bin’s Keyword Tags panel, click the Start People Recognition icon (it looks like a Polaroid photo of a person’s head and shoulders) or go to Find→“Find People for Tagging.”
Confirm Elements’ choices and identify the people it found.
After it analyzes your photos, Elements opens the People Recognition window with all the faces it found in those images. If it made a mistake or if you don’t want to tag one of the people, click that face (or tree, or whatever) and then click the close button at the top-right corner of the thumbnail.
Tip
If Elements shows you something that isn’t a face, it’s worth taking a look at the photo itself. Occasionally there will be people in the photo but Elements just put the frame in the wrong place.
Below each person’s face is the question, “Who is this?” Click that text and type the person’s name. As you type, Elements suggests names based on the tags you’ve used before. If you see the one you want, just click it to select it.
When you’re through tagging people, click Save.
Elements displays a little congratulatory window and any names you’ve added appear in the Organize bin’s Keyword Tags panel under the People category. If you want to move a tag to another category, like Family, just drag it where you want it.
To see all the photos of a particular person you’ve tagged, double-click the person’s name in the Keyword Tags panel, or double-click the thumbnail of an image where you’ve tagged the person. In the large single-image preview that appears, click the arrow to the right of the tag on the person’s face and Elements shows you all the photos definitely identified as that person (confirmed) and those it thinks might be that person (unconfirmed). That way you can tag them all at the same time. If Elements missed someone in your photo or missed a photo altogether, you can easily remedy that. Just click the Add Missing Person button (the little human silhouette below the image’s bottom right). A square outline appears on the image, and you just drag it till it’s around the face Elements missed. If Elements misidentified someone, click the name it assigned and type the correct one.
Note
As mentioned on Working with tags and categories, you probably want to disable the rest of Elements’ Auto-Analyzer features. But to use People Recognition, go to Edit→Preferences→Media-Analysis and be sure that “Analyze Photos for People Automatically” is turned on. (If you aren’t going to use People Recognition, you can save a little drain on your system’s resources by turning it off.)
Elements lets you group photos into albums, which are great for gathering together pictures taken at a particular event. You can also use them to prepare groups of photos that you want to use in a Create project like a slideshow or photo collage (Photo Collages).
When you create an album, you don’t actually make a copy of all the photos you include in it; you just create a group of virtual “pointers” to each image so Elements knows where to find them. That means albums can hold lots of pictures without taking up much space and, even better, you can easily include the same pictures in different albums. Photos in an album can appear in any order you choose, which is important if, for instance, you’re preparing a slideshow.
Albums are particularly handy if you’re using Photoshop.com, since they give you a convenient way to upload, sync, and back up your photos without working with your whole catalog at once.
Tip
Albums are also good for gathering together groups of photos you want to export for use with another program. Elements makes it very easy to do that: In the Organize bin’s Album’s panel, click the New Album button (the green + sign)→Save Albums to File.
Elements gives you several ways to create albums:
From the Organizer. First Ctrl-click/⌘-click to select the photos you want to include. Then go to the Organize bin→Albums, click the New Album button (the green + sign), and then choose New Album. Name your album and assign it to an album group (explained in a moment) if you wish, and then click Done. Your new album joins the list of albums.
You can also make an album from files anywhere on your computer, even if they’re not in the Organizer, by clicking the New Album button and then selecting From File from the pop-out menu.
From the Editor. In the Editor, you can create an album from the Project bin’s Bin Actions menu (Image windows).
From the Share tab (Editor or Organizer). To create an online album (one that you upload to Photoshop.com), just click Online Album in the list of projects.
Note
No matter which method you use to make your album, it will appear in the lists of albums in both the Organizer and the Project bin’s Show menu.
You can share any album online as you create it (see Online Albums for more info), or share existing albums by uploading them to your Photoshop.com account (just click the Edit Album button at the top of the Organize bin’s Album panel [the pencil icon]). You can also share your album in other ways by right-clicking its name in the list of albums and then choosing the export method you want to use. (Albums you create by clicking the Share tab’s Online Album button are uploaded automatically.) Elements gives you lots of options for displaying your photos in a gallery and sharing them with friends. Chapter 18 has more about working with and sharing online albums.
Note
You can also burn albums to CD or DVD, or upload your slideshows and galleries to your own website. Other Ways to Share explains how.
Once you’ve created an online album and shared it to Photoshop.com, you can edit it using the online Organizer in any web browser, which lets you add or delete photos, reorganize photos, tag them, and so on. The online Organizer looks just like the Organizer on your computer, and you use it the same way. You can synchronize your online album(s) so that changes you make online are reflected in the album(s) stored on your computer, and vice versa (Online Syncing and Backups explains how). You can even sync albums between two desktop computers this way.
In the Organizer, to see the photos in an album, just click its name in the Albums panel. To return to viewing all your photos, click the Show All button above the left side of the thumbnail area.
You can also create album categories, which are just what they sound like. If you have a lot of albums, you can group them into categories to make them easier to keep track of. To make an album category, go to the Organize bin’s Albums panel and click the New icon (the green + sign)→New Album Category. Name your category and it appears in the Albums list. To add albums to it, just drag their icons onto the category’s icon. To remove an album from it, click the flippy triangle to the left of the category’s name so you can see all the albums it contains, and then right-click the album you want to remove and choose “Edit <album name>.” In the window that opens, go to Album Category→None (Top Level) and then click Done.
You can also create subcategories within categories. To do that, in the Albums panel, right-click a category and choose “Create new album category in <category name> category.” The new category appears as a subcategory of the original one.
Smart Albums are another useful feature. They automatically collect all the photos that meet the criteria you specify, as shown in Figure 2-13. To create a new Smart Album, in the Organizer, go to the Albums panel and click New (the green + sign)→New Smart Album.
Figure 2-13. When you create a Smart Album, this dialog box appears so you can choose criteria for it. Click the + sign to add a search parameter. Here, the Smart Album “Best Vacation Pics” is set up to include photos with tags in the Places category, ratings of more than three stars, and the word “vacation” in their caption or description. Elements automatically adds photos that meet all three of these criteria to this Smart Album.