3. Tagging, Grouping, and Searching Photos
Lesson overview
As your image collection grows larger and larger, keeping track of your photos can be a daunting task. Photoshop Elements delivers sophisticated, intuitive organizing tools that make the job enjoyable.
When the time comes to search and filter your photo library for that special shot that you know is in your catalog somewhere, the same sophisticated, intuitive tools will make it just as much fun to find it.
In this lesson, you’ll learn a few more techniques for sorting and grouping your photos, and a variety of ways to search your catalog:
• Using ratings to classify images by quality or usefulness
• Working with keyword tags and categories
• Using version sets and stacks to organize the thumbnail grid
• Grouping photos in albums
• Searching for people, places, and events
• Managing files in the My Folder list
• Filtering by date or import batch with the Timeline
• Finding photos by similarity, metadata, and text search
You’ll probably need between one and two hours to complete this lesson. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to download the combined work files for Lessons 2 and 3 from the Lesson & Update Files tab of your Account page at www.peachpit.com.
It’s time to reap the rewards for all that sorting, reviewing, tagging, and organizing! Revisit the People, Places, and Events views in search-and-filter mode, where locating the photo you want is as easy as asking “Who, where, and when?” Find out how to set up complex, multi-criteria filters that can be saved and run again whenever you import new images, making it easy to keep your albums up to date.
Getting started
Before you begin this lesson you should complete the Lesson 1 setup exercises “Creating a catalog for working with this book” and “Getting photos from files and folders” and all of the exercises in Lesson 2.
Most of the exercises in Lesson 3 work with sample photos that were imported in the two preceding lessons, and require that your catalog is already organized with the People, Places, and Events tags applied in Lesson 2.
Making it easier to find your photos
In Lesson 2, you made a start on organizing your image library by sorting and tagging the photos in terms of faces, locations, and events. In Lesson 3, you’ll learn more ways to order and “mark” your images, and discover how organizing your catalog can pay dividends by making it quick and easy to find the photos you want using the Organizer’s search capabilities.
It’s a good idea to make several sorting and tagging passes through each batch of photos you import while they’re still fresh in your mind, so that they don’t get lost in forgotten corners of your hard disk. This becomes an increasingly important strategy as you add more images to your library.
1. In the Organizer, click the Import button at the upper left of the workspace, and choose From Files and Folders from the menu.
2. In the Get Photos and Videos from Files and Folders dialog, navigate to and open the folder Lesson 2-3, and select the subfolder Zoo. Make sure that the option Get Photos from Subfolders is selected and the other automatic processing options are deselected; then, click Get Media.
3. In the Import Attached Keyword Tags dialog, click Select All; then, click OK.
4. The newly imported images appear in the Media Browser. Click the Clear button at the right of the bar above the thumbnails to clear the Last Import filter and view all of the photos in your catalog.
Rating photos
Rating your photos is a simple yet effective way to add another level of organization to your catalog. With a single click or keystroke, you can mark a photo as one of your best, or relegate it to the bottom shelf—even while you’re reviewing your images full-screen. You might choose from your five-star collection for a creative project, select from photos with a rating of three stars or higher for a presentation, or trim your catalog by removing all your un-rated rejects.
1. Make sure that Media is selected in the view picker at the top of the workspace. Click the All Media button (
) or the Back button (
) if either is visible in the actions bar above the Media Browser, so that you see all the images in your catalog, rather than a filtered selection or the contents of a single folder.
2. Click the Import 1 folder in the My Folder list in the left panel.
3. In the Media Browser, move the pointer slowly from left to right over the stars beneath your favorite photo in this folder. When you see five yellow stars, click to apply that rating.
4. Select one of the other images in the Media Browser, and then press a number from 1 to 4 on your keyboard to apply that rating. Rate the remaining photos in the Import 1 folder, using whichever method you prefer.
5. To filter the Media Browser to display only those images from the Import 1 folder with three or more stars, click the third star in the Ratings filter at the right of the bar above the thumbnails, and choose the appropriate qualifier from the adjacent menu.
Tip
The more photos you rate, the better for the demonstration of search features later in this lesson.
6. Click the third star in the Ratings filter once more to deactivate the filter. Select each of the other folders in the My Folder list in turn, and rate about half of the photos in each folder. For the folders Import 3 and Import 4, try to rate a selection of images from each of the photo series in each folder.
7. When you’re done, click the All Media button () to show all the images in your catalog, rather than the contents of a single folder.
Tagging photos with keywords
Keyword tags are custom labels that you can attach to your photos and other media files, making it possible to sort them—and later, search for them—by personalized associations other than people, places, and events.
Keyword tags make it unnecessary to set up subject-specific folders or rename files with content-specific names. Both of these latter solutions are inflexible, confining a given photo to a single group. In contrast, you can assign multiple keyword tags to a single photo, associating it with several different groups of images simultaneously, and then use a keyword search to quickly retrieve any of those collections, even if the image files are scattered through different folders on your hard disk.
Keywords provide a perfect solution for tagging images that don’t feature people you know, or where the location or event at which the photos were captured is not a particularly relevant association.
For photos that are already tagged for People, Places, and Events, keywords can be used to refine a search. For example, you could use People and Places tags to quickly isolate all your photos of Kat and Tom together in New York, and then use keywords to filter for winter shots captured at night.
Organizing keyword tags and categories
1. If necessary, click the Tags/Info button at the far right of the Taskbar to open the right panel group.
2. If you don’t see a list of keywords—or at least, the collapsed Keywords header—at the top of the right panel group, click the Tags tab to bring the Tags panel to the front. If necessary, click the arrow at the left of the Keywords header to expand the Keywords list.
Photoshop Elements ships with a few default keywords to help get you started. In this exercise, you’ll convert two of the default keywords to keyword categories by creating subcategories inside them, and then make a start on organizing your keywords by moving them into a hierarchical arrangement.
3. Select the Nature tag at the top of the Keywords list by clicking the word (not the checkbox to the left of it); then, click the small arrow beside the green plus sign button (
) to the right of the Keywords header. Examine the options available in the menu; then, choose New Sub-Category.
4. In the Create Sub-Category dialog, the selected Nature keyword has been automatically set as the parent category inside which your new tag will be nested. Name the new subcategory Animals, and then click OK to create the new Keywords listing and close the Create Sub-Category dialog.
5. Right-click/Control-click the Nature tag, and choose Create New Sub-Category. Name the new subcategory Scenic, confirm that Nature is set as the parent category, and then click OK.
6. Expand the Imported Keyword Tags category, if necessary, to see all the keyword tags that you’ve imported together with the lesson images.
7. Ctrl-click/Command-click to group-select the Aquarium, Birds, Bison, Elephant, Giraffe, Monkey, and Siamang keywords that were imported with the photos from the Zoo folder. Drag the seven selected keyword tags to the Animals tag in the expanded Nature category.
Tip
Although this procedure does not add the Nature or Animals keywords to the Zoo photos as tags, searching your catalog for either “parent” keyword will return any image tagged with any of the keywords nested inside these categories.
The Animals tag is converted to a keyword category, with the seven relocated tags nested inside it.
8. Select the Animals category; then, click the small arrow beside the green plus-sign button () at the upper right of the panel, and choose New Sub-Category from the menu. In the Create Sub-Category dialog, name the new subcategory Mammals. The selected Animals keyword has been automatically set as the parent subcategory. Click OK.
9. Drag all of the tags in the Animals category other than the Birds keyword to the new Mammals subcategory. Right-click/Control-click the Mammals keyword, and choose Create New Sub-Category. Name the new subcategory Primates, and then click OK. Drag the Monkey and Siamang tags into the new subcategory.
Customizing the Keywords list
You can see that the keyword list will soon become quite complex. Color-coding the categories you use most often, and assigning thumbnail images to the tags in place of the generic tag icons, may make navigating the hierarchy easier.
1. Choose Preferences > Keyword Tags and Albums from the Edit menu (Windows) or Preferences from the Elements Organizer menu (Mac OS). In the Keyword Tags and Albums pane of the Preferences dialog, activate the picture tag option under Keyword Tag Display. Click OK to save the setting.
2. In the Keywords list, right-click/Control-click the Nature category, and choose Edit from the context menu. In the Edit Category dialog, click Choose Color, and choose a color from the picker. Leave the category name unchanged. Scroll the Category Icon menu, and click to select an icon; then, click OK to close the Edit Category dialog.
The Nature category now has a distinctive icon and color-coded badges on its subcategories and keywords, making it stand out in the list. If you can’t see the full keyword names, drag the left edge of the panel group to make it wider. If the edited Nature category changes position in the Keywords list, drag it back to the top.
3. Right-click/Control-click the Monkey tag, and choose Edit from the menu. In the Edit Keyword Tag dialog, click the Edit Icon.
4. Use the arrows at the sides of the Find button in the Edit Keyword Tag Icon dialog to cycle through all the photos tagged with the Monkey keyword. When you see the image you want, drag the handles of the bounding box to set a new keyword badge. A thumbnail at the top of the dialog shows how the image will look applied to a tag icon. Click OK to confirm the new badge image; then click OK to close the Edit Keyword Tag dialog.
5. Click the arrow beside the plus sign button () to the right of the Keywords header, and choose New Category. In the Create Category dialog, name the new category Travel. Choose a tag badge color and category icon, and then click OK. Right-click/Control-click the new category in the Keywords list, and choose Create New Sub-Category. Name the nested subcategory Family Trips.
Creating and applying keyword tags
You can also work with keywords in the People, Places, and Events views.
1. Click People in the view picker at the top of the Organizer workspace.
2. In the People view, click All People at the left of the actions bar, if necessary, to see all your People stacks. Double-click the Emma stack to expand it. If you see only faces, click the switch in the actions bar above the thumbnails to switch from the Faces view to the Photos view. Select the image People_12.jpg. If you don’t see that image in Emma’s stack, you may have tagged it with the wrong person’s name; check the other People stacks to locate and select the photo.
3. With the People_12.jpg image selected in the expanded People stack, click the Info button at the right of the Taskbar, and then type Hill Walking in the text box at the top of the Image Tags panel. Click Add to apply the new keyword to the selected photo.
Now, you’ll use the Places view to locate the other photos shot at the same location.
Tip
If you prefer to see the thumbnails in image cells as shown below, activate Gridlines in the View menu.
4. Click Places in the view picker. In the Places view, the map pans to focus on the Scotland marker. Use the zoom button (+) to zoom in by three or four clicks. The marker divides to show two location pins. Click the selected pin (the blue one) to select the rest of the photos associated with that location.
5. Switch to the Media view, and drag the Hill Walking tag from the Tags/Info panel to one of the selected photos; all the selected images gain that tag.
6. Deselect all the photos, and then Ctrl-click/Command-click to select just the four scenic landscape shots featuring the rocky Scottish coastline.
7. Drag the Scenic tag from the Tags/Info panel to one of the selected photos to apply the tag to all of them.
8. Expand the Travel keyword category, if necessary; then, drag the Hill Walking tag from the category Other into the subcategory Family Trips.
9. Drag the Travel category to the top of the Tags panel, and release the mouse button when you see a black line indicating an insertion point just below the Keywords header.
10. Right-click/Control-click the Hill Walking tag, and choose Edit from the context menu; then, customize the tag thumbnail as you did in the previous exercise.
You’ll end your keyword-tagging expedition in the Events view, where you’ll tag all the images from one event, and just a selection of photos from another.
Tip
If you don’t see names on the image stacks in the Events view, click the switch above the thumbnails to move from Smart Events view to the regular Events mode.
11. Click Events in the view picker. Double-click the Annie’s Wedding stack to expand it. Press Ctrl+A/Command+A to select all the photos in this Event; then click the Info button at the right of the Taskbar, and type Milestones in the text box at the top of the Image Tags panel. Click Add to apply the new keyword to all of the selected photos. Click the Back button in the actions bar above the thumbnail grid to collapse the Annie’s Wedding stack and see all of the Events in your catalog.
12. Expand the Scottish Road Trip stack by double-clicking it. Select the six images in this Event that feature the Rua Reidh lighthouse. In the Image Tags panel, type Lighthouse in the text box; then, click Add to apply the tag.
13. Click Media in the view picker to return to the Media Browser and see your new tags listed in the Keywords list. Press Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows)/Command+Shift+A (Mac OS) to deselect all of the images in the current selection. Set a new thumbnail for the Lighthouse and Milestones keyword tags as you did for the other new tags.
Grouping photos
As the number of files in your photo library increases, it can be more difficult to spot the image you want amongst the thumbnails displayed in the Media Browser. Simply grouping some of your images in stacks and version sets can reduce the clutter in the thumbnail grid, effectively simplifying the view by hiding collections of related shots behind a single thumbnail until they’re needed.
Working with version sets
A version set groups a photo in its original state with any edited copies that you’ve generated, so you can find all the edited versions of the image stacked behind a single thumbnail in the Media Browser, rather than scattered through your catalog.
Photoshop Elements automatically creates a version set whenever you edit a photo in the Elements Organizer. When you edit an image from your catalog in the Editor, you can choose whether or not to create a version set in the Save As dialog.
Grouping your edited files in this way not only makes it much easier for you to find the version you want, but also lets you keep your original, unedited photo intact, easy to find and ready for a different treatment whenever you want to re-use it.
1. If the All Media button is visible in the actions bar above the thumbnails, click it to ensure that the Media Browser is showing all of the images in your catalog.
2. Expand the Nature category in the Keywords list, and then click the checkbox at the left of the Animals tag to isolate the zoo images. Scroll down, if necessary, and select the image DSC_0736.jpg.
You have just made your first keyword search. With one click, you’ve retrieved all the photos from your last import, despite the fact that they are spread across seven folders and are tagged with as many separate keywords.
Note
The Smart Fix edit corrects the overall color balance and also enhances detail in the brightest and darkest areas of the image.
3. Click the Instant Fix button in the Taskbar to open the Photo Fix Options panel. Make sure that the image DSC_0736.jpg is still selected; then, click Smart Fix.
The edited copy is stacked on top of the original photo in a version set. A version set can be identified by a badge (representing a stack of photos overlaid by a paintbrush) in the upper-right corner of the thumbnail and by a filename extension (indicating that the photo has been edited).
4. Click the Crop button in the Photo Fix Options panel. Drag the handles of the cropping box to crop the image closer around the subjects. Click Done.
5. Click the expand button (
) to the right of the thumbnail image to see the original and edited images in the version set displayed side by side. Select the original image, DSC_0736.jpg, and click Smart Fix once again.
Tip
If you applied a star-rating to this photo earlier, you’ll notice that the edited copies have inherited the same rating. If you think the Smart Fix and Crop operations represent an improvement, increase the rating for your preferred version.
6. There are now three photos in the version stack, with the most recent copy on top. Select the first copy, DSC_0736_edited-1.jpg—the center image in the version set—and choose Edit > Version Set > Set as Top Item. The two edited copies change places in the stack; the older version is now the “cover photo.”
7. To see only the topmost photo in the version set, click the collapse button to the right of the original image, or right-click/Control-click any photo in the set and choose Version Set > Collapse Items in Version Set from the context menu. Note the other commands available from the same context menu; these commands can also be found in the Edit > Version Set menu.
About stacks
Scrolling past rows and rows of images of the same subject—when it’s not the one you’re looking for—can be time-consuming and frustrating. You can reduce clutter in the thumbnail grid and make browsing for photos more enjoyable, and far more productive, by stacking related shots behind a single, distinctive thumbnail.
Tip
Stacks are particularly useful for managing long series of related images, such as shots taken at sports events with your camera’s burst mode or auto-bracket feature. When you take photos this way, you end up with many variations of what is essentially the same image—if you stack the series, you’ll see only the best shot in the Media Browser.
Glancing along just one row of stacks in the thumbnail grid could save you the effort of scrolling through screen after screen of distracting images.
1. In the Media Browser, Ctrl-click/Command-click to select the four images shot at the aquarium, including the version set you created in the previous exercise.
2. Right-click/Control-click the photo you edited earlier, and choose Stack > Stack Selected Photos. The images are stacked, with the edited copy on top, now marked with a stack icon beside its version set badge. Click the arrow at the right side of the stack frame to expand and collapse the stack.
3. Select the four images of elephants, and then right-click/Control-click the photo you’d like to set as the top image, and choose Stack > Stack Selected Photos from the context menu. Repeat the process for the four photos of black siamangs from Thailand and the six images of American bison.
Stacking photos automatically
You can automate the process of grouping related photos in your catalog by having Photoshop Elements suggest stacks, based on visual similarities between images.
Tip
Experiment with as many of your own photos as possible, so that you’ll get a feel for the kind of images that perform best with this feature.
1. Press Ctrl+A/Command+A to select all of the photos in the Media Browser; then, choose Edit > Stack > Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks.
In the Visual Similarity Photo Search dialog, Photoshop Elements presents four groups as potential stacks. Before you go ahead and stack these groups, let’s look at the options for tweaking the automatic stacking process manually.
2. To merge the first and second suggested groups—both of which contain photos that feature squirrel monkeys—Shift-click to select the images in either group, and drag them to the other.
3. Click Unique Photos at the lower left of the Visual Similarity Photo Search dialog. The Unique Photos pane shows any photos from the selection in the Media Browser for which Photoshop Elements has been unable to suggest a stack.
Tip
You can simply reverse this process to remove a photo from a group suggested for stacking.
4. Drag the first image in the Unique Photos pane to the top group of five shots featuring squirrel monkeys. Drag the next four images to group them with the two other photos featuring birds, and then add the last two images to the two photos of giraffes in the bottom group.
5. When you stack these groups, the first image in each group will become the top image in the stack. Drag your favorite photo from each group to the first position in that group, and then click the Stack button at the right of the divider bar above the group. Each of the new stacks displays the stacked photos badge.
6. Click Done. In the Media Browser, the 34 photos with keywords in the Animals category are now displayed as just seven stack thumbnails. Click the Tags/Info button in the Taskbar to reopen the Tags and Image Tags panels. Click Media in the view picker; then click the Back button in the actions bar, if it’s visible, to see all of the photos in your catalog.
• Combining two or more stacks merges them to form one new stack, with the most recent photo on top of the stack. The original groupings are not preserved.
• Many actions applied to a collapsed stack, such as editing and printing, are applied to the top item only. To apply an action to multiple images in a stack, either expand the stack and group-select the images, or un-stack them first.
• If you edit a photo that you’ve already included in a stack, the photo and its edited copy will be grouped as a version set nested inside the stack.
• If you apply a keyword tag to a collapsed stack, the keyword tag is applied to all items in the stack. When you run a search on the keyword tag, the top photo in the stack appears in the search results, marked with the stack icon. If you want to apply a keyword tag to only one photo in a stack, expand the stack first.
Tip
To access stack commands, right-click/Control-click any image in a stack, and choose from the Stack submenu. Alternatively, select a photo in the stack, and choose from the Edit > Stack menu.
Creating albums
Another way of grouping your photos is to organize them into albums. An album is like a virtual folder where you can assemble a collection of images that may be drawn from any number of actual folders on your hard disk. You might create a new album to collate and arrange the pictures that you intend to include in a creative project such as a photo book or a slide show, or to group your images of a special interest subject such as flowers, classic cars, or macro photography.
Tip
You can achieve similar groupings and subgroups by using keyword tags, but your Road Trips album may contain only a subset of the photos you’ve tagged with the keyword Road Trips.
A photo can be included in more than one album—the same image might be the first in a New York Architecture album and the last in a National Monuments album. You can also group albums; for example, you might group your New York and San Francisco albums together inside a Vacations album, while your Road Trips album includes the San Francisco album, but not the New York album.
The principal advantage to grouping photos in an album rather than using a shared keyword tag is that in an album you can rearrange the order of the photos as you wish. In the Media Browser, each photo in an album displays a number in the upper-left corner, representing its place in the order. You can drag photos to change their position within the album, which will affect the order in which they appear in a slide show or their placement in a project layout.
1. If necessary, click the Tags/Info button in the Taskbar to show the Tags panel. In the Keywords list, locate the Animals > Mammals > Primates subcategory; then, click the checkbox at the left of the Primates tag to isolate all the images with tags that are included in that category. The grid displays two stacks that you created earlier.
Note
You can create both local and mobile albums. Local albums contain media that resides only on your computer and connected storage media, while mobile albums are uploaded to Adobe Revel and stored in the cloud, where you can access them on your iPhone or iPad, and share them publicly or privately. In this series of exercises, you’ll learn the basics by working with local albums.
In albums, stacks are a special case: You can include a stack in an album, but only the top photo from the stack will appear in a slide show, for instance, unless you expand the stack and select all the photos inside it before you start the slide show.
You can’t rearrange the order of stacked photos in an album, add a selection of photos from a stack to an album without adding the entire stack, or remove a stacked image from your album without removing the rest of the stack.
So, start by unstacking the photos in the Primates category.
2. Shift-click to select both of the stacks in the Media Browser, and then choose Edit > Stack > Unstack Photos.
3. Select the best three shots of the black siamangs; then, in the Albums panel at left, click the Create New Album or Album Category button () beside Local Albums. Make sure you click the green plus sign, not the small arrow beside it.
4. In the New Album panel at the right, type Monkey Business as the name for the new album; then, click OK in the Taskbar below the panel.
Tip
If you don’t see the album badges below the thumbnails in the Media Browser, use the Zoom slider in the Taskbar to increase the size of the thumbnails. Hold the pointer over the album badge to see which album or albums a photo belongs to.
5. Expand the Local Albums category in the left panel, if it’s not already visible. Your new album appears in the Local Albums list, and the three siamang photos that you selected for inclusion are marked with green album badges.
Adding more photos to an album
As you import more images to your catalog, you may have new photos that you’d like to add to existing albums—an easy way to sort and organize a fresh import—or perhaps you’re assembling a collection for a photo book over several work sessions.
1. With the Media Browser still filtered to show photos with keywords in the Primates category, right-click/Control-click the new album, and choose Edit from the context menu. The Edit Album panel opens at the right.
2. Ctrl-click/Command-click to select the best three of the six photos featuring squirrel monkeys. Drag the selected photos into the Content pane in the Edit Album panel; then, click OK in the Taskbar.
Tip
You can drag photos directly to the album in the Albums list, and vice versa, but the Edit command also gives you the opportunity to rename the album, or change its place in the hierarchy of the Albums list.
3. If necessary, click Clear in the search results bar above the thumbnails to clear the Primates filter. You can now view all of the photos in your catalog. Click the Tags/Info button at the right of the Taskbar to close the right panel group, if necessary.
4. Click the Monkey Business album in the Albums list.
5. The Sort By option in the actions bar above the thumbnail grid is set to Newest. Change it to Album Order, and notice the counter in the top-left corner of each image, denoting its order in the album.
6. The six photos are arranged in the order in which they were added to the album. Drag the thumbnails to rearrange them, alternating siamangs and squirrel monkeys. When you’re done, click the All Media button () in the actions bar so that the Media Browser displays all of the photos in your catalog.
Creating albums from People, Places, and Events
In Lesson 2, you used the People, Places, and Events views as aids to organizing your catalog—and your effort is already paying off. Now you can take advantage of the search and filter aspects of those views to help find the photos you need.
Tip
Remember that whatever the viewing mode, the People view displays only those of your photos that have already been tagged with People tags.
1. Click People in the view picker at the top of the workspace. If necessary, set the switch in the actions bar to Group, rather than People, and click the Groups button (
) in the Taskbar to show the Groups list at the right; then, expand the Family > Kids group. Click the listing for the Twins group to select the Twins group, which contains People stacks for Pauline and Sophie.
2. Double-click the Sophie stack. Make sure the switch in the actions bar is set to display Photos, rather than Faces. Ctrl-click/Command-click to select the photos of the twins together without their sisters, and any images of Sophie alone.
3. In the Albums panel at the left, click the Create New Album or Album Category button () beside the Local Albums category, making sure you click the green plus sign, not the small arrow beside it. In the New Album panel at the right of the workspace, type Double Trouble as the name for the new album; then, click OK in the Taskbar.
Your new album appears in the Local Albums list, and the selected photos are now marked with green album badges.
4. Click the Back button in the actions bar to return to the Group view, and then double-click the Pauline stack to expand it. Ctrl-click/Command-click to select any images of Pauline alone, and drag them directly to the Double Trouble album in the Albums list. The added photos are marked with green album badges.
You’ve successfully leveraged the People tags that you attached to your photos in Lesson 2 to perform a simple People search, making use of the various viewing modes in the People view to help locate the photos you needed for the new album.
Tip
If you don’t see the map or the pins (or Scotland), see steps 1–4 in the exercise “A short trip to the Places view” in Lesson 2.
5. Click Places in the view picker at the top of the workspace. In the Places view, click the northern map pin of the two pins positioned on Scotland to select the photos associated with that pin in the thumbnail grid.
6. Scroll through the thumbnails, if necessary, and Ctrl-click/Command-click DSC_0330.jpg (a rear view of a Scotsman wearing a green kilt) to add it to the selection. Both of the Scotland pins should now be selected, and the image count in the lower-left corner of the workspace should show that there are 19 photos selected.
7. Click the Create New Album or Album Category button () at the top of the left panel, making sure you click the button, not the small arrow beside it. In the New Album panel at the right of the workspace, type Highlands Hike as the name for the new album; then, click OK in the Taskbar below the panel.
Your new album appears in the Local Albums list in the left panel, and the selected photos are now marked with green album badges. You’ve just used the Places view to filter your catalog by location to help find the photos for this album.
8. Click Events in the view picker. Shift-click to select the Event stacks NY Marathon 2010 and NY Marathon 2011; then, click the Create New Album or Album Category button () at the top of the left panel.
9. In the New Album panel, type Running New York as the name for the new album. Ctrl-click/Command-click in the Content pane to select three or four images that you’d like to exclude from the album, and then click the trash-can icon at the bottom of the panel to remove them. Click OK in the Taskbar.
The new Running New York album appears in the Local Albums list in the left panel, grouping the marathon photos that you located by filtering for Events tags.
Tip
If you’re unable to re-order the photos in an album, check the Sort By setting at the left of the bar above the thumbnail grid. For albums, the sorting order should be Album Order.
10. Click Media in the view picker. In the Media view, click each of the albums Double Trouble, Highlands Hike, and Running New York. If you wish, you can rearrange the order of the thumbnails in the grid for each of your newly created albums.
11. When you’re done, click the All Media button () in the actions bar to see the unfiltered contents of your catalog in the Media Browser.
Access your photos anywhere with Mobile Albums
1. In Photoshop Elements, choose File > Manage Catalogs. If you’ve already established a separate catalog for your own photos, select it in the Catalogs list, and click Open. If you haven’t yet started building a personal catalog, click New; then, enter a name for the new catalog, and click OK to load it.
2. Import a selection of your own photos to your personal catalog, and group a few of your favorites into several small Local Albums. If necessary, refer to the preceding exercises on creating albums.
3. In the Organizer, click the blue info icon (
) to the right of the Mobile Albums category in the left panel to sign in to Revel.
Note: If you already have a Revel account with the same Adobe ID that you used to register Photoshop Elements, you may not see the blue icon. If you see an orange icon instead, sign in to Revel by choosing File > Sign In to Online Account. If you see only the green plus sign icon (), you’re already signed in, and your catalog is linked to Revel.
4. In the Elements Mobile Albums sign-in screen, enter your Adobe ID and password; then, click Sign In.
5. On the screen that appears, you can specify whether you want to upload all of the media in your Photoshop Elements catalog or just those files you select. For now, choose the second option. Click Next; then, click Done to dismiss the final setup screen.
6. Your Revel library is listed under Mobile Albums in the left panel. Click the arrow beside the green plus sign icon () to the right of the Mobile Albums header, and choose Settings to open the Online Account tab in Elements Organizer Preferences.
7. Inspect the settings and options in the preferences pane; you can sign out of Revel, choose a Revel library from the Libraries list, specify a folder for downloads, set Revel to access your entire catalog, and upgrade your Revel account status from Complimentary to Premium. You can also disable or reactivate the Revel Agent or set it to upload video only when your system is idle. Click Cancel to leave the settings unchanged.
Uploading Photos to Revel from the Organizer
1. In the Organizer, drag an album from the Local Albums category onto the listing for your new Mobile Albums library.
2. Repeat step 1 for another of your local albums. Wait a minute or two for your upload to be completed; then, launch your web browser, and go to adoberevel.com. Sign in with your Adobe ID.
3. At the top of the Revel page in your web browser, click between Photos & Videos and Albums. On the Albums page, select an album to see the contents. Click an image to see it enlarged; then, click the X at the upper right to exit the single-image view.
4. In the actions bar just below the header, click Select Items; then, select one of the images in your album. Click Delete in the actions bar, and then click OK to confirm the action. Return to the Elements Organizer, and click the mobile album from which you deleted the photo; the image has been removed from the selected album.
5. Select the other mobile album in the left panel. Right-click/Control-click one of the photos in the Media Browser, and choose Edit with Photoshop Elements Editor. In the Editor, choose Enhance > Convert to Black and White; then, click OK to accept the default conversion. Choose File > Close, and then click Save. Accept the default name for the edited file, and make sure that the options “Include in the Elements Organizer” and “Save in Version Set with Original” are both selected. Click Save, and then click OK to accept the JPEG options.
6. Wait a minute or so; then, return to your web browser, and click Albums in the header of your Revel page. Choose the album containing the photo you just edited; the edited version appears beside the original in your Revel album. Click the cog icon at the right of the header, and choose Sign Out; then, return to the Organizer.
7. Choose File > Manage Catalogs; then select your CIB Catalog from the list, and click Open.
Filtering and finding photos
In this lesson, you’ve begun to take advantage of the Organizer’s search and filter capabilities—even while you’ve been concentrating on using it to mark and manage your images. Most of the search and filter tools are so well integrated into the Elements Organizer workspace that you’re barely aware of using them.
Tip
This is what’s referred to as an “And” search: “Show me items that are in the Import 1 folder and have a rating of three stars or higher.”
At the start of this lesson, you learned how to apply ratings to your photos. By the time you reached step 5, you had already performed a two-term search—with just two clicks. You filtered your catalog so that you could look at the images in a single folder (by choosing from the list in the left panel), and then refined the search to show only the photos with the highest ratings (by clicking a star in the actions bar).
Tip
This is referred to as an “Or” search: “Show me any item that is tagged with this keyword or that one ... or any of these five.”
In the second exercise, you tidied up your keywords list by dragging keyword tags into a hierarchy of categories and subcategories. This simple housekeeping task made it possible to find the images for the exercises that followed by running a seven-term search—this time with just one click! A single click on the Animals category filtered your catalog for all the images of birds, bison, elephants, giraffes, monkeys, seals, and siamangs—retrieving photos found in seven separate folders.
Finding people, places, and events
The first time you visited the Places, People, and Events views, you were learning how to sort and tag your photos. During the last exercise, you discovered that each of these workspaces also serves as a filter, capable of presenting your images in a variety of different arrangements to help you locate the photos you’re looking for. In this section, you’ll take another look at finding people, places, and events.
Looking for somebody?
1. Click People in the view picker. If you don’t see the heading “All People” in the center of the actions bar above the thumbnails, the People view is either displaying images of just one of the people in your catalog or of whatever people it can find in just a selected part of your catalog. To see all of the people in the whole of your catalog, click the Back button or the All People button at the left.
2. If the switch at the left of the actions bar is set to Group, click it to shift to the default People view; you’ll look at the Group view a little later.
3. To quickly skim through all the photos in any of your People stacks, move the pointer slowly across the stack thumbnail. Stop moving the pointer, and then right-click/Control-click whichever image is currently visible to see the commands that can be applied to the stack. Skim through each People stack.
Even the All People view is a search result—the stacks displayed are the answer to the question “Which people are in my catalog?”
Note
When you skim the contents of a People stack with a single album or folder selected as the image source, rather than the entire catalog, remember that the photo that you set as the profile picture (the image you see at the top of the People stack) may not be present in that album or folder.
4. Click to select Double Trouble from the Albums list in the left panel. The question is now “What people are in the Double Trouble album?” The answer: Pauline and Sophie. To see exactly which pictures of Pauline and Sophie are in this album, move the pointer slowly across each of the stack thumbnails.
5. Click each of the other albums to see who’s inside, switch to the Folders panel, and then work your way down the My Folder list. You can skip the ones with animal names; the girls do appear here and there, but there are no People tags attached to these images. When you’re done, click the All People button.
6. Double-click the Lilly stack to show all the images in the catalog that are tagged with Lilly’s People tag. Toggle the switch in the actions bar to shift between the Faces and Photos views. Leave the view set to display the full photos featuring Lilly, rather than the cropped thumbnails of her face.
Tip
In the People view, you can see an image in the enlarged single-image view, just as you can in the Media view, by double-clicking the image. If you do this with one of the thumbnails in Faces mode, you’ll find that the view has changed to People mode when you return to the grid.
Your catalog is still small, so there are not many pictures of any of the people you’ve tagged, but as your photo library grows, you may see hundreds of photos of a given person in this view. Scanning these thumbnails may be better than looking through every photo in your catalog, but it can still be daunting. You can effectively filter the view by selecting individual albums or folders as the image source.
7. Lilly is not tagged in any of your albums, but click through the four Import folders to see which photos of Lilly appear where. Leaving the Import 4 folder selected, click Back in the actions bar to see all the people in that folder; then, click the All People button to deselect the Import 4 folder as the image source.
Note
In the Groups view, people that are not included in any group will appear under an Ungrouped header.
8. Click the switch in the actions bar to shift from the standard People view to the Group view. If necessary, click the Groups button () in the Taskbar to see the Groups list; then, expand the Family > Kids group. Click back and forth between the Family and Twins listings to shift the focus of the Groups view.
Depending on the size of your screen, you may not see anything happen when you click the different group listings. Make the Organizer window smaller, so that not all the groups are visible, and then repeat the last action. This feature will come in handy when you have more groups in your catalog.
To move a person from one group to another; simply drag her People stack to a different entry in the Groups list. To remove someone from a group, right-click/Control-click his stack, and choose Move To Ungrouped from the context menu.
9. Switch the People view back from Group mode to the default view; then, click Media in the view picker to return to a view of your entire catalog.
Finding people from the Media view
You can also work with your People tags in the Media view, making it quick and easy to leverage all that tagging and grouping to find the photos you want.
1. If necessary, click the Tags/Info button at the far right of the Taskbar to open the right panel group.
2. In the Tags panel, expand the People Tags category; then, expand the Family group and the two groups nested inside it.
3. Move the pointer over the Kids tag, and click the checkbox that appears to the left.
Depending on the accuracy of your face tagging, this search should return 19 photos. The search results bar above the thumbnails lists the Kids tag as the single search term.
4. Click the Clear button at the right of the search results bar to clear the filter. If necessary, click the Tags/Info button in the Taskbar to reopen the right panels.
5. In the People Tags list, click the checkbox to the left of the Emma tag. The Media Browser should display nine photos. Click the arrow beside the Sophie tag. The thumbnails in the grid are reduced to those images with both People tags. Click the arrow beside the Pauline tag; the search results bar lists the Emma, Sophie, and Pauline tags as search terms.
The search returns only five images including all four girls; in other words, there are no photos of Emma together with Sophie and Pauline, but without Lilly.
6. Expand the Events Tags list, and click the checkbox beside the Annie’s Wedding tag. The grid displays only two photos of all four girls taken on that occasion.
7. Click the Clear button in the search results bar to clear the filter.
Searching every place
Now you’ll revisit the Places view to look at several search and filter features that you’ve not yet explored.
1. Click Places in the view picker. Press Ctrl+Shift+A/Command+Shift+A to make sure no images are selected. If you see the All Places button in the actions bar, click it. If you don’t see the map, or the map is too small, set up the Places workspace as you did earlier in this lesson, or refer to the exercise “A short trip to the Places view” in Lesson 2. When you’re done, choose View > Refresh.
2. In the Albums panel at the left, click the Highlands Hike album in the Albums list. The map shows two red pins marking locations in Scotland, UK. The thumbnail grid displays the photos in the selected album—a subset of the images from the Scottish Road Trip event that you created in Lesson 2.
3. Click each pin in turn to see which images are placed at each location, and then reverse the process; click photos in the grid to activate their pins.
This search asks the question “Which photos in the Highlands Hike album were shot in Edinburgh?”
4. Click the Running New York album, and select any of the images. The map jumps to the pin on Manhattan, New York. Zoom in by two or three clicks.
5. In the Folders panel, select the Import 1 folder in the My Folder list, and then select any image; the view jumps back to Scotland. This time, the map is focused on just one of the Scottish locations: the remote and rugged site of the Rua Reidh lighthouse. Select the Import 2 folder, and click any image to focus on the city of Edinburgh. Click away from the pin to deselect the selected image from the Import 2 folder.
6. Click the All Places button in the Taskbar above the thumbnails to clear the Import 2 filter and display all of the photos in your catalog that have map locations and Places tags. Use the Zoom slider in the Taskbar to reduce the size of the thumbnails so that you can see them all.
The image count in the lower-left corner of the workspace indicates that there are 55 items associated with marked locations on the Places view map.
7. Zoom the map out so that you can see both of the pins in Scotland; then, watch the thumbnail grid as you click the checkbox at the lower left of the Map panel to activate the Show Only Media Visible On Map option.
The New York photos are no longer visible in the grid; the number of thumbnails displayed has dropped to 36.
8. Drag the map to the right so that only one of the two pins is visible. When you release the mouse button, the thumbnail grid displays only the 18 items on the northern pin. Drag the map toward the left until only the southern pin is visible, and then release the mouse button; the thumbnail grid displays the 18 photos captured in Edinburgh.
1. Click Events in the view picker. In the Events view, choose Edit > Deselect to make sure that you have no Events selected. If you see the All Events button in the actions bar, click it. If the Events view is set to Smart Events mode, click the switch in the actions bar to shift to the default Events view. The grid displays an Event stack for each of the five Events you created in Lesson 2.
2. If you don’t see the calendar, click the Calendar button (
) at the right of the Taskbar. The calendar’s header currently reads “All Years,” indicating that the Events view is displaying all the Events in your catalog, regardless of their dates.
3. Click the All Years heading; the drop-down menu shows that your catalog contains Events from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Choose 2010 from the menu. The Events view is now filtered to show only two Events: Annie’s Wedding and NY Marathon 2010.
4. The months June and November are highlighted on the 2010 calendar, indicating that one of the Events on view occurred in each of those months. Click June; the page for this month shows just one Event, on the 26th. Click June 26 on the calendar to select the Event listed for that day. Choose 2011, 2012, and then 2013 from the Year menu to filter the view for events falling within those years, and then click Clear above the calendar to see the Events view unfiltered. Click the Calendar button in the Taskbar to hide the Calendar panel.
5. Use the switch in the actions bar to shift to Smart Events mode. In default mode, Smart Events suggests likely Event stacks amongst the photos in your catalog (or in a selected folder) on the basis of single capture dates. In this mode, the grid shows fourteen suggested events—fourteen dates that account for all the images in your catalog—four of which contain only one photo.
6. Smart Events has divided the Scottish Road Trip photos into five stacks according to their capture dates. Ctrl-click/Command-click to select the stacks dated 5/21/2013 and 5/22/2013; then, right-click/Control-click either stack, and choose Name Event(s). Name the Event Touring the Highlands; then, click OK.
The five-day Scottish Road Trip has not been split up; Smart Events has merely detected the date-based groupings among the photos that make up that Event, and allowed you to name a subset of the whole as an Event in its own right.
7. Name the stack dated 6/1/2011 A trip to the zoo.
8. Change the grouping mode from Date to Time in the bar just above the suggested stacks. The number of suggested Events drops to three; Smart Events has now grouped the images in your catalog on the basis of clusters of capture dates. Skim the images in the last of the suggested stacks, which contains all of the photos in your catalog other than two single images captured earlier than 2010.
9. Move the grouping slider slowly to the right, increasing the number of suggested Events by narrowing the range of dates in each cluster. Drag the slider all the way to the right, and then look through the ten suggested Events. In the last stack but one, Smart Events has successfully grouped the 36 photos from the road trip in Scotland, which were captured over five days.
10. Switch back from Smart Events mode to the default Events view to see your new Event stacks. When you’re done, click Media in the view picker.
Locating files in the My Folder list
Most of us have our own strategies for organizing and searching for files among the folders on our hard disks. The Elements My Folder list can do everything you’re used to doing in the familiar Windows Explorer or the Mac OS Finder—the important difference is that your actions in the folders list are tracked by the Organizer, so that you’ll never need to locate and reconnect files that (having been moved or renamed outside Photoshop Elements) are no longer recognized by the catalog.
1. If necessary, clear any active filters and deselect any album or folder selected in the left panel by clicking the Back button or the All Media button in the actions bar, and then click the Folders button in the left panel.
The My Folder list is the default folders view, listing only your managed folders—folders containing media files that have already been imported to your catalog.
Tip
You can identify a managed folder in the hierarchy (a folder that contains media files that are already part of your catalog) by the picture icon on the folder (
). Watched folders (on Windows only) display a binoculars icon (
).
2. Click the menu icon (
) at the right of the My Folder list, and choose View as Tree. The list reveals the folder structure on your hard disk. By default, only those branches of the hierarchy that lead to managed folders are expanded. Click the plus sign (+) or minus sign (-) beside any folder to expand or collapse it. Right-click/Control-click the PSE13CIB/Lessons folder, and choose Show All Subfolders from the context menu to see those subfolders not yet managed by Photoshop Elements.
3. Select any managed folder in the My Folder list to filter the thumbnail grid so that you see only the contents of that folder. Right-click/Control-click the folder to see the options available in the context menu. Click the All Media button in the actions bar to see all the images in your catalog once more.
4. Right-click/Control-click any image in the Media Browser, and then choose Go To Folder from the context menu. The folder in which that photo is stored is selected in the My Folder list, and the Media Browser displays only the managed files inside it. Click the All Media button to see all the images in your catalog. Click the menu icon in the Folders panel, and choose View as List.
Using the Timeline to refine a search
The Timeline is an effective search tool in its own right, but you can also use it in combination with any of the other search and filter tools to help you to refine a search or to navigate the results. You might search for photos with a particular keyword tag, and then use the Timeline to narrow the search to the files from a particular import batch, or images captured within a specific date range.
Note
The height of the bars indicates the relative number of files captured in each month.
1. Make sure the Sort By option in the actions bar is set to Oldest; then, choose View > Timeline to show the Timeline above the Media Browser. The Timeline breaks your catalog down by import date; you can see that your catalog contains images captured in six different years over a ten-year span, from the oldest entry in September 2003 to the most recent in August 2013.
2. Click any of the bars in the Timeline, or drag the sliding frame; the thumbnail grid scrolls, if necessary, to show you the first image in the grid with a capture date that falls within the appropriate month.
3. Drag the markers at the ends of the Timeline inward to define a range of six or eight months. The grid now displays only the images captured in that period.
4. In the actions bar, set the Sort By option to Import Batch. The bars in the Timeline now represent import batches arranged in chronological order.
5. Click a bar in the Timeline; the view scrolls to show you the first image imported in that batch. In the thumbnail grid, the photos are grouped under batch headers. You can select all the images in a batch by clicking the header. Choose View > Timeline to hide the Timeline, and then reset the sorting order to display the oldest images first.
Finding photos by searching for keywords
There are several ways to locate photos that are tagged with a particular keyword, or with a given combination of keywords. We’ll start with a basic text search.
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+A/Command+Shift+A to make sure you have no files selected, and then choose View > Expand All Stacks.
Tip
A text search will also find matches in filenames, album names, captions, notes, dates, and other text embedded in your photos’ metadata.
2. Click in the text search box at the top of the workspace, and type the letter A. A drop-down menu offers shortcuts drawn not only from the keywords in your catalog, but also from any People, Places, and Events tags that match the letters you type. It also automatically searches filenames, captions, notes, and author fields. Press Backspace/Delete, and then type the letter B. This time, the menu shows two keywords that you created earlier. Add the letters ir. The choice is narrowed to Birds, and the thumbnail grid is already filtered to show all of your images of birds. Click a menu shortcut, or finish typing whichever keyword you prefer.
Tip
For a list of supported operators (and, or, not, etc.) for text searches, please refer to Photoshop Elements Help.
3. Click the Back button in the actions bar above the thumbnail grid to clear the text search. Try typing Birds and Bison; are there any images tagged with both of these keywords? Click Back, and then try Birds or Bison; how many photos are tagged with at least one of these keywords? Try walk not lighthouse. When you’re done, clear the keyword search by clicking the Back button.
Tip
You can refine a keyword search by choosing a folder or album from the left panel or by defining a date range in the Timeline.
4. Now you’ll run a keyword search from the Tags panel. If necessary, click the Tags / Info button at the far right of the Taskbar to see the right panel and expand the Other keywords category. Click the checkbox to the left of the Lighthouse tag. The Media Browser displays six photos with this tag.
5. In the actions bar, click the second star in the Ratings filter to refine the search.
Saving complex searches
It’s unlikely that the results of the search you’ve set up will ever change, no matter how many photos you add to your library; the Scotland vacation and the walk in the Highlands are done. However, when you set up a search with more generalized criteria, it can return more images each time new matches are added to the catalog.
1. In the Tags panel, click the checkboxes for the Family Trips keyword (from the Travel category), the Kids people-tag group, and the United States Places tag. Choose a rating of three stars or higher in the Ratings option.
There are no photos in your catalog that match these criteria—but that may well change after the next school break. You can save this search and run it periodically to find the best shots to add to your happiest family album.
2. Click the Options button at the right of the search results bar, and choose Save Search Criteria as Saved Search. In the Create Saved Search dialog, type in the text box to name the search Best of Kids US Vacations, and then click OK.
3. Click the Back button in the actions bar to clear the search; then, click the magnifying-glass icon at the left of the text search box at the top of the workspace, and choose Saved Searches from the menu.
4. Select your saved search in the Saved Searches dialog, and then click Open. The search results bar lists your saved search criteria. Click Clear in the search results bar.
Tip
To modify the criteria that define a saved search, and even change it from an “and” search to an “or” search, select the search in the Saved Searches dialog, and then click New Search Query.
Finding photos by searching their metadata
Some metadata attached to an image file is generated automatically by the camera; more is added when you spend time organizing your catalog. Searchable metadata includes file attributes, tags, ratings, albums, version sets, captions, notes, capture date, and a range of camera model, lens, and exposure details—to mention just a few!
The Details (Metadata) search lets you leverage all that information to find exactly the files you want; for example, run any search, and then filter for just the shots taken with a wide angle lens.
1. Choose Find > By Details (Metadata).
2. Choose the criteria you want from the menus provided. Also, any metadata search you define can be saved as a saved search by simply activating that option below the search rules. Set up a few search rules of your own, and examine the criteria menus to see the many searchable categories.
3. Click Cancel to dismiss the Find by Details (Metadata) dialog.
Finding photos by visual similarity
In Lesson 2, you used the People Recognition feature and saw how easy it makes the task of tagging the faces in large numbers of photos. In this section, you’ll look at another set of tools that harness the power of Photoshop Elements’ automatic image-analysis software.
1. In the Tags panel, click the checkbox to the left of the Animals keyword to isolate all the photos with that tag.
2. Click the magnifying-glass icon beside the text search box, and choose Visual Similarity Search from the menu.
3. Choose Edit > Deselect, and then drag the image DSC_00614.jpg to the Find bar.
Note
The search results you see on screen may vary from those illustrated here, depending on your operating system.
The search returns images displayed in the Media Browser by visual similarity to the photo you dragged to the Find bar. A marker displaying the calculated percentage of visual similarity for each image appears in the bottom-left corner of its thumbnail, and a slider appears at the Find bar for tweaking the search results. The optimum position for the slider will vary for each image searched.
4. Experiment with the Color/Shape slider. A move to the left weights the analysis towards similarities in color, texture, and pattern; moving the slider to the right returns images that share more in terms of shape, proportion, and composition.
5. Right-click/Control-click the thumbnail in the Find bar, and choose Remove from Search. Make another image the object of a new search. Experiment with the Color/Shape slider, and then repeat the process for several more images.
In some cases it may be helpful to add a second reference photo to your visual search. You can either drag a second image to the Find bar or click the plus sign (+) to the right of the first reference photo in the Find bar and select a second image from the Media Browser. The search will look for a combination of visual attributes.
6. Click Clear at the right of the actions bar; then, repeat step 1.
1. In the Media Browser, select the image DSC_0472.jpg, a photo of a siamang.
2. Choose Find > By Visual Searches > Objects Appearing in Photos.
3. In the enlarged view, drag the bounding box to the ape’s head. Use the handles at the corners of the bounding box to fit it neatly around the shape, and then click Search Object.
Once again, the results are ranked by similarity to the reference object. As for all visual searches, you can refine the search results by tweaking the Color/Shape slider.
4. When you’re done, click the Back button at the left of the actions bar.
Finding and removing duplicate photos
The last of the visual search options finds and groups duplicated (or very similar) images, and then gives you the opportunity to either stack them or delete them from your catalog—great for housekeeping as your image library gets bigger.
Tip
The Duplicate Photos search can be particularly helpful for dealing with long series of photos captured with a camera set to the auto-bracketing or multi-burst mode.
The process is very similar to the automated stacking workflow (see “Stacking photos automatically” earlier in this lesson). You’ll be presented with groups of similar photos; for each group, you can stack the photos and keep them in the catalog, confirm them for removal, or do nothing.
Hiding files
You’ve already learned how creating stacks and version sets can help reduce clutter and repetition, effectively reducing the number of images on view by tucking the excess shots away behind a cover photo. However, all of those stacked images will still appear in search results—distracting you when making selections, and needing to be taken into consideration whenever you apply a command to the top photo. Once you’ve settled on the best of a stack of similar photos, or of several edits in a version set, it can be more effective to hide all the other images from view (and from the search tools) completely. Hiding a photo does not delete it from its folder on your hard disk, from your catalog, or even from an album—you can un-hide it at any time if you start a new project where it might be useful or if you find that you could make use of a differently edited version.
You’ll find the commands for marking an image as hidden, and for showing or hiding images marked as hidden, in the Edit > Visibility menu.
Congratulations—you’ve reached the end of Lesson 3! In this lesson, you’ve created version sets, stacks, and albums, and discovered more techniques for finding and managing your files.
Review questions
1. Do you need to be in the Media view to add keyword tags to an image?
2. What are version sets and stacks?
3. What is the main difference between grouping files using shared keyword tags and grouping them in an album?
4. Once you’ve activated your complimentary Adobe Revel account, how do you upload images to Revel?
5. Why would you save search criteria as a saved search?
Review answers
1. Though the Tags panel in the Media view offers the most keyword tagging options, you can add keywords to your photos in any of the other three Organizer views by typing in the text box in the Image Tags panel. To show the Image Tags panel in the People and Events views, you’ll first need to expand a stack, and then click the Info button at the right of the Taskbar. In the Places view, the Info button is available at all times.
2. A version set automatically groups an original photo and its edited versions. Stacks can be created manually or automatically to group similar or related photos. A version set can be nested inside a stack: if you edit a photo that’s in a stack, the photo and its edited copy are put in a version set nested inside the stack. Both version sets and stacks make it easier to locate photos by reducing the clutter in the thumbnail grid.
3. The main difference between grouping files in an album, rather than with a shared keyword tag, is that in an album you can rearrange the order of the files.
4. To upload an album to Adobe Revel, drag it from the Local Albums category in the Organizer’s left panel to the listing for your Revel library under Mobile Albums. You can upload a photo or a selection of photos from the Media Browser in the same way.
5. For many searches, you can easily “save” the results—in other words, preserve the grouping of images that match the search criteria—by creating an album or by tagging all the photos returned by the search with the same keyword, Place, or Event tag. Once established, these groupings are static; their content will not change over time unless you manually add or remove photos or tags. A saved search, on the other hand, can be more versatile; you can run the same complex search again and again, returning more images that match the search criteria each time you add photos to your catalog.