How to Use Adobe Elements Photo Organizer

Contributor

By Richard Burke
eHow Contributing Writer

Article Rating:

(15 Ratings)

One of the features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is the Photo Organizer which allows the user to manage and find their images on the computer. The Photo Organizer is actually a separate program from the editor and will open in its own window. I personally don’t find the Organizer as intuitive as other organizers like Picassa. However, it does have the advantage of working seamlessly with the other parts of Adobe Photoshop Elements. It is also useful to learn how to use this feature since a lot of the Photoshop creative projects integrate with the organizer workspace. In this article we will demonstrate the basic functions of the organizer. You will need to make the personal decision if this is the best way to manage and organize your images.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0
A folder with images

Step 1

Open Organizer

If you open Adobe Photoshop Elements in the Editor mode, simply click on ORGANIZER to open the organizer workspace. Notice the organizer opens in a separate window. Click on YES to open the FIND PHOTOS window and add photos to the workspace. Click on the PLUS sign under Albums to create a new album for your pictures.
Step 2

Find Photos

The browser defaults to MY PICTURES in the windows MY DOCUMENTS folder. You might think you should just click OK, but be careful with your selection. Do you have thousands of images in this folder? The organizer will make a thumbnail of each image and hold those images in the workspace. If you select MY PICTURES, thousands of thumbnails will be created each time you open the organizer. Should you move any of these images outside of organizer, the program will want you to relink each image every time you open the organizer. It makes more sense to add each of your image folders into a separate album. This takes time.
Step 3

Add Album

It is easy to add albums. Simply click on the plus sign to add a new album. Notice you can group albums together and add notes for each album like the location and date. Once you have opened the album, select and drag the thumbnails from the workspace to the album. The images will remain in the workspace, but now below each image in the workspace is an icon associating it with a specific album.
Step 4

Rate Your Photo

You can rate each photograph with a specific STAR rating. This is very easy to do by just clicking on the star value you want for each image. After you have created your image archive with Organizer, you can then search for images by star rating and all the images with the same star rating will appear in the workspace.
Step 5

Add Keywords

You can also assign KEYWORDS to each image. Since this album is called Pittsburgh, I can assign a place keyword to the images. This will bring up a keyword dialogue box that will allow me to type in Pittsburgh. After you have created your image archive with Organizer, you can then search for images by keyword and all the images with the same keyword will appear in the workspace. You can also add your own keywords. I could create a keyword called “Dawn Tawn” and tag all my Pittsburgh images to that keyword. You can have multiple keywords for each image. After you have created all your albums and tagged each image with a keyword, you can use Organizer to search your image data base for specific topics, locations or people.