PSE Organizer


		Photoshop Elements Organizer



	Photoshop Elements Organizer Written by: Siegfried Seierlein Last Updated: 11th May 2008 I have been using Elements from version 4 and the Organizer has always been part of the package. The organizer has been refined and developed a lot over the previous versions and in Elements 6 it is now a very powerful organizer. The organizer consist of two main areas, the *Photo Browser* and the *Organize Bin. From the top picture you will see the Photo Browser is the main part displaying the thumbnails and the Organizing Bin is on the right and from there one create Albums, Keywords* and *Tags* to help organize large collections. From the organizer workspace it is possible to start any type of project, like editing a photo or building a slide show or building a album page, at the top right corner all commands giving access to the different parts of Elements is located. The Organizer is really easy to work with and is very self explanatory. In this brief article I will give a few hints and guidelines I experienced in the past to help you to work well.

The following is a short list of good habits I can recommend when working with the organizer:

If you already used your organizer to download pictures and today you have a collection not well organized and you like to start over, its not difficult and its never to late. Go to the first or the top left picture and press Shift+End. That will select your complete collection. Press Delete and in the next window select OK.
The next step is to plan your picture collection and how you like to organize it. This will include the Albums and the Tags in the organizer and your directory structure in Windows.
I strongly recommend that you create a directory structure that are similar to how you like to organize your picture collection. Photoshop only creates a date sub directory and place all the pictures in there. After one year all that is on the hard disk is a large number of date sub directories and it is very difficult to find a picture in there without the organizer.
For example create a New Pictures directory where all new pictures are downloaded to, with a date format and on a regular basis you move your pictures into the right directories. These directories could be, family, holidays, functions, ext.
Personally I do not load all my pictures into the Photoshop Organizer. When I connect my camera I copy the pictures to the New Pictures directory, sort them and only the ones I like to, I upload into the organizer
The Organizer can become very slow if one is not careful. RAW files is a killer plus unnecessary duplicates. I therefor only keep the “good and clean” files in my organizer.
Its only PSE 6 that has Albums, in previous versions it was called Collections. The Albums works way better Use them as much as possible as it will help to keep the number of pictures open at a time in the organizing bin less and therefor the organizer speed will be lightning fast.


		In this area one can create as many Albums as one like. As said before this is a major improvement over previous versions. Think of albums in a similar way than when you had pictures in photo albums. You could have a holiday album, a wedding album, visit from a friend and so much more. Albums also help you when you like to start a project like building a slide show.

	The heart of the organizer is the Tagging of pictures. Pictures can have multiple tags. For example one picture could be part of a event, it could be part of a specific collection you have like trains plus it could be one of your best group of pictures. Below each picture you can also give a picture a star rating. Just move your curser over the stars and click on the rating you like to give the picture. What works well is to have the tags one size bigger than in the picture to the left and to have a picture inside each tag... You can create and delete as many tags as you want.

In this area you can read all the information about your picture. You can give it a Caption by double clicking in the caption line, you can rename the file or add a description. You might find it interesting to read up on the different ways technologies like, Windows, Exif, Meta data, are tagging and how info is saved in picture files. Who and what systems can read this data is also interesting. For example if a picture is tagged holiday in Zoombrowzer, can Elements read that. It all depends on what system was used and if the different systems are compatible.




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