Understanding the Organizer Work Area 28
Working in the Photo Browser 29
Displaying and Changing Information for Your Photos 31
Using Keyword Tags to Sort and Identify Photos 38
Using Categories to Organize Tagged Photos 44
Using Albums to Arrange and Group Photos 48
Reviewing Photos Full Screen 54
Using Stacks to Organize Similar Photos 58
Digital photography can be a double-edged sword. Ironically, its greatest advantage to the amateur photographer—the ability to quickly and easily capture a large number of images, and then instantly download them to a computer—can also be its greatest source of frustration. Once hundreds of images have been downloaded, photographers find themselves faced with the daunting task of sorting through myriad files, with incomprehensible filenames, to find those dozen or so “keepers” to assemble into an album or post to the Web for friends.
The Organizer workspace comes to the rescue with a relatively simple and wonderfully visual set of tools and functions to help you locate, identify, and organize your photos. And once your photos are organized, you can import categories and collections of images that you assemble directly into projects like slide shows, calendars, flipbooks, and online albums.
Because we need some source material to work with, this chapter jumps right into importing photos from a digital camera and opening images already on your hard disk.
Digital cameras have revolutionized photography and are a main force driving the need for products like Photoshop Elements. Typically, these cameras come with their own software to help you browse and manage photos—but don’t bother breaking the seal on the disc’s envelope. You can access your camera from within Elements and then download your images, or download photos from the camera to your hard drive and then open them in Elements.
To import images from a digital camera (Standard dialog):
If the Photo Downloader launches automatically, skip to step 3. If you don’t see the Photo Downloader dialog, continue to step 2.
If you’re in the Organizer already, go to the File menu, choose Get Photos and Videos, and then choose From Camera or Card Reader or press Ctrl+G.
The Photo Downloader dialog opens in its Standard mode . For more importing options, see “To import images from a digital camera (Advanced dialog),” just ahead in this chapter.
Listed below the menu are the number of pictures, and their combined size.
If you want to save the files to a different location, click the Choose button and select a folder or create a new one. Then click OK to return to the Photo Downloader dialog.
• None saves the files in the folder specified by Location, normally your My Pictures folder.
• Custom Name creates a folder with a name that you enter .
• Today’s Date automatically creates a folder named with the current date.
• Shot Date creates folders with the date the images were captured; choose your preferred date format from one of the options .
For example, your camera’s default naming scheme is probably something like “IMG_1031.JPG.” With a Rename Files option selected, you can name and number a set of photos “Vacation,” for instance. Then your photos will be saved and named “Vacation001.jpg,” “Vacation002.jpg,” and so on.
The Automatic Download option is useful if you want to offload pictures onto the computer without going through the Photo Downloader. Images download automatically when a camera or other device is attached. You can turn it off later in the program’s preferences.
Your downloaded photos will first appear in their own Organizer window. Click the Show All button to return to the main Organizer window .
To import images from a digital camera (Advanced dialog):
By default, the Photo Downloader assumes you want to download every image.
• Automatically Fix Red Eyes attempts to correct red eye problems in your photos as they’re downloaded.
• Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks groups similar photos together for easy organization and review later (see “Using Stacks to Organize Similar Photos,” later in this chapter).
• Make ‘Group Custom Name’ a Tag takes the name you specified in Step 5 two pages back and creates a keyword tag (see “Creating Keyword Tags,” later in this chapter).
• Import into Album assigns the photos to a photo album you’ve previously set up (see “Using Albums to Arrange and Group Photos,” later in this chapter).
For a fast way to select just a few photos for import, first click the UnCheck All button, and then click on the photos you want—don’t worry about clicking their individual checkboxes. With the images selected, click just one checkbox to enable the boxes of your selections.
Photoshop Elements can import photos stored in Camera RAW formats, which are the unprocessed versions of the captured images. RAW enables more adjustment possibilities than JPEG (which is processed and compressed in the camera). Elements brings RAW files into the Organizer without editing the image information. When you edit the photo, Elements first brings up the Camera Raw dialog to set initial edits before opening the image in the Editor. For more information, see “Adjusting Camera Raw Photos” in Chapter 7.
The contents of the Creator and Copyright metadata fields are applied to all photos imported in that batch. If you want different authors for the pictures, for example, either import them in several batches or edit the metadata after they’ve been added to the catalog.
To import images from files or folders:
If you insert media that contains pictures, such as a CD, Windows may ask what action you’d like to take (if you haven’t specified it already). Click the icon labeled Organize and Edit using Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0, which opens the Get Photos from Files and Folders dialog.
Now that we’ve gotten those steps out of the way and you understand what’s going on, here’s a much quicker method: Simply drag image files from a folder on your hard disk to the Organizer’s window. Elements imports them without fuss.
If you know some photos exist on your hard disk but can’t find them, let Elements hunt for them instead. Under the Get Photos submenu of the File menu, choose By Searching, enter criteria about the files, and click the Search button.
To import images using Watch Folders:
To scan an image into the Organizer:
If you’re planning to use only part of an image, you’ll save a lot of time by using your scanning software to crop your image before importing it into Photoshop Elements .
On the off chance that you want to scan an image in black and white (not grayscale), well, don’t. Elements doesn’t recognize bitmap images.
To capture frames from video footage:
The Frame From Video dialog appears.
The video clip appears in the dialog .
To grab the frame you want, you can also use the Pause button to stop the video at the desired frame. Another useful option is to simply move the slider to the correct frame in the video.
As you click the Grab Frame button, the images appear as new files in the Editor .
You’ll likely encounter a greater variety of exposure problems with video frames than with the still shots you take with a digital camera. You can easily fix contrast and tonal problems with a few of Photoshop Elements’ correction tools, which you’ll explore more in Chapter 6 and in Chapter 7.
The Organizer is divided into two main components: the Photo Browser and the Organize Bin. The Photo Browser, along with its timeline, is used to find and view thumbnail representations of your photos. The Organize Bin contains the Albums and Keyword Tags panels you’ll use to group and organize your image files .
At the core of the Organizer is the Photo Browser. Every digital photo or video downloaded into Photoshop Elements is automatically added there. Resizable thumbnails in the Photo Browser window make it easy to scan through even a large number of images.
The Organize Bin on the right side of the window holds the Albums and Keyword Tags panels. You use these to identify, sort, and organize your photos .
An optional, but helpful, way to quickly navigate your photos by date is the timeline, located just above the Photo Browser. Choose Timeline from the Window menu, or press Ctrl+L. For example, when a Date viewing option is selected in the Browser window, the timeline uses date and time information embedded in each image to construct bars (month markers) to represent sets of photos taken within specific months and years. When a month marker is selected in the timeline, that month’s photos are displayed at the top of the Photo Browser .
The centerpiece of the Organizer is the Photo Browser, a flexible workspace that provides a number of options for customizing the way you manage and view your image files. Throughout this chapter I’ll cover a variety of ways to work in the Photo Browser to label, identify, and organize your photos. But first it’s important to know how best to select, sort, and display the image thumbnails.
To select photo thumbnails:
Do one of the following:
• Click to select a thumbnail in the Photo Browser. The frame around it becomes light gray, indicating that the thumbnail is selected .
• Ctrl-click to select several non-adjacent thumbnails at once .
• Shift-click to select a group of thumbnails in sequence .
• From the Edit menu, choose Select All, or press Ctrl+A to select every thumbnail in the Photo Browser.
To deselect photo thumbnails:
Do one of the following:
• Ctrl-click to deselect a single thumbnail.
• From the Edit menu, choose Deselect, or press Ctrl+Shift+A to deselect every thumbnail in the Photo Browser.
You can tweak the appearance of the Photo Browser. From the View menu, you can choose to display details such as filenames, ratings, timestamps, and people recognition.
To sort photo thumbnails:
• From the Arrangement drop-down menu above the Photo Browser, choose a sorting option :
• Date (Newest First) displays the most recent photos at the top, judged by the images’ creation dates.
• Date (Oldest First) displays photos in order, with the oldest at the top.
• Click the Display button to choose how photos are grouped:
• Thumbnail View (Ctrl+Alt+1) is the default grid of thumbnails.
• Import Batch (Ctrl+Alt+2) groups photos into the batches they were imported in. Included is information on when the batch was imported and from what source .
• Folder Location (Ctrl+Alt+3) displays photos grouped into the folders in which they’re stored, and provides detailed file-path information to make it easy to locate the folder and original files on your hard drive.
To resize photo thumbnails:
• Above the Photo Browser, drag the thumbnail slider to the right to increase the size of the thumbnails, or to the left to make them smaller .
• Click the Small Thumbnail button to the left of the slider to display the thumbnails at their smallest possible size.
• Click the Single Photo View button to the right of the slider to display just one large photo thumbnail at a time.
Double-click on any thumbnail to change to Single Photo View. Double-click the image to return to your most recent multiple thumbnail view settings.
Images you import from a digital camera or scanner carry embedded file information— everything from the date and time a photo was shot or scanned to whether or not the camera’s flash fired. The Organizer uses that date and time information to determine the display order of the photo thumbnails in the Photo Browser.
If your camera’s clock wasn’t set properly before shooting (a problem especially if the batteries die), the Adjust Date and Time dialog lets you substitute a new date and time for any image file. You can also easily adjust for time zone differences by shifting the time a set number of hours.
To adjust the date and time:
• Change to a specified date and time opens the Set Date and Time dialog where you can set a specific year, month, day, and time .
• Change to match file’s date and time reverts the date and time information to what is embedded in the original image file.
Remember, date and time changes you enter here are only for sorting and organizing your images within the Photo Organizer.
• Shift by set number of hours (time zone adjust) adjusts the time of selected images forward or backward by the number of hours that you specify .
A preference enables you to open the Adjust Date and Time dialog by simply clicking on the date in the Photo Browser. From the Edit menu, choose Preferences > General, and then select the Adjust Date and Time by Clicking on Thumbnail Dates option.
To rate a photo:
To add a caption to a photo:
You can also add and edit captions in Single Photo View. In Single Photo View, click the Click here to add caption text. The text changes to a text field where you can type a new caption. If you’ve previously entered a caption, click on the text to edit or delete it.
You can add the same caption to multiple images at the same time. Select a group of images in the Photo Browser, and then from the Edit menu choose Add Caption to Selected Items. The caption you enter in the Add Caption to Selected Items dialog is applied to the selected images.
To rename a photo:
To add a note to a photo:
The humble little tag serves as the foundation for the Organizer’s sorting and filing system. You can create a tag from scratch or create one based on a set of photos grouped within a folder. Use names that are descriptive, but not so specific that they apply only to a limited number of photos.
To create a new keyword tag:
Your new tag appears in the Keyword Tags panel within the category you chose .
The first photo to which you attach a new tag automatically becomes the icon for that tag. This is an easy and convenient way to assign tag icons, so I’ll ignore the Edit Icon button for now.
You can associate a location with a tag (whether or not it’s categorized as Places) by clicking the Place on Map button in the Create Keyword Tag dialog. See “Using the Map,” later in this chapter.
To import tags from other images:
Click the Advanced button to access more options such as renaming the tags before they’re imported .
To create a tag using the Keyword Tags field:
Better yet, type several keywords, separated by commas, to create and apply them together.
I’m happy to detail the different methods of creating and applying keyword tags in this chapter, but for me, the capability to do it from the Tag selected media field trumps the other methods. It’s quick, and promises to make keyword tagging much less of a chore than in the past.
To change a tag’s properties:
Or
To delete a tag:
In the Keyword Tags panel, select the tag you want to delete and click the Delete button (the red minus sign) .
Or
The tag is removed from the Keyword Tags panel and from any photos tagged in the Photo Browser.
Tags operate independent of where photos are located on your computer, which means you can attach a tag to photos in different folders—even on different hard drives—and then use that tag to quickly find and view those photos all at once.
To attach a tag to a single photo:
• Drag a tag from the Keyword Tags panel onto any photo in the Photo Browser .
• Type a term into the Keyword Tags field; if the tag already exists, click it from the pop-up list that appears .
A category icon appears below the photo in the Browser window to indicate that it has been tagged; in the Keyword Tags panel, the tag assumes that photo for its tag icon .
To attach a tag to multiple photos:
A category icon appears below all of the selected photos in the Browser window to indicate that they have been tagged.
To attach a tag to an import batch or folder:
All of the photos in the group are automatically selected.
A category icon appears below all the selected photos.
To view a set of tagged photos:
In the Keyword Tags panel, do one of the following:
• Double-click a tag.
• Click the blank box to the left of a tag.
A small binoculars icon appears in the box, and the Photo Browser will change to display just the photo or photos that carry the attached tag .
To view all photos again, click the Show All button, or click the binoculars icon in the Keyword Tags panel.
To remove a tag from a photo:
Select a photo thumbnail in the Photo Browser, and then do one of the following:
• Right-click a photo thumbnail; then, from the contextual menu, choose Remove Keyword Tag > (name of tag).
• Right-click on the category icon below the photo thumbnail and select Remove (name of tag) Keyword Tag from the contextual menu .
To change a tag’s icon:
To assign a new icon image in the Edit Tag Icon dialog, you can select from any of the photos that the tag has been applied to, or you can import a completely new photo.
The new image appears in the preview window of the Edit Tag Icon dialog.
If you’d like to use an image for your icon different than any of the photos you’ve tagged, click the Import button in the Edit Tag Icon dialog to browse your computer and select an image.
In addition to the hierarchical display of tags, you can view keywords in a “cloud”: All keyword tags are listed; terms applied more frequently appear in larger type. Click the Keyword Tag Cloud button in the Keyword Tags panel .
To view photos using the Tag Cloud:
Click a keyword in the cloud to view all photos to which the tag is applied.
To apply a tag from the Tag Cloud to a photo:
To edit or delete a tag using the Tag Cloud:
The Organizer can help you tag images using its Auto-Analyzer feature. It scans your library and applies Smart Tags for characteristics such as High Contrast, Blurred, Pan Motion, and more. You can then locate images using those criteria by choosing Smart Tags in the Keyword Tags panel.
To analyze selected photos:
The photos gain a Smart Tag icon; hold your pointer over the icon or right-click to reveal which tags were applied .
To analyze photos automatically:
You can also choose which filters to apply; for example, if you don’t store any audio or video files in the Organizer, you may want to disable the Audio filter. Click OK.
In the preferences, enable the “Run Analyzer only when System is idle” option to prevent the Organizer from monopolizing your computer’s processors.
If you’ve installed only Photoshop Elements, just three filters are available in the preferences: Blur, Brightness & Contrast, and Face. With Premiere Elements also installed, additional filters appear in .
The Find People for Tagging feature offers an easy way to sort, identify, and tag photos based on the people in them.
To identify a person:
• Type a name . If it’s a new person, a new keyword tag is created under the People category and applied to the photo.
• Click the name of an existing tag that appears below the field.
• The Organizer will start to make suggestions as the database of faces grows . Click the green checkmark button if the suggestion is correct; click the red button to enter a different name.
If you want to identify faces in a large number of photos, choose Find > Find People for Tagging, or click the Start People Recognition button in the Keyword Tags panel. The Organizer displays photos zoomed in on faces for faster labeling .
All tags must reside in either a category or sub-category. The Organizer starts you off with four ready-made categories, but you can create as many new categories and subcategories as you want. Tags can be easily moved from one category to another and also converted to a sub-category that contains its own set of tags.
To create a new category:
Your new category appears at the bottom of the Keyword Tags panel.
To create a new sub-category:
To convert a tag to a sub-category:
If you decide you’d like to convert a sub-category (that was formerly a tag) back to a tag, go to the Sub-Category contextual menu and choose the Change sub-category to a tag option. All the tag’s properties, including its icon, are retained.
To assign a tag to a new category or sub-category:
If you’ve already applied the tag to a photo or photos in the Photo Browser, the category icons below the photo thumbnails will automatically update to display the icon of the new category.
You can also move tags into new categories or sub-categories right in the Keyword Tags panel. With both the tag and the category or sub-category visible, simply click to select a tag and then drag it onto a category or sub-category icon. The tag will nest beneath the category or sub-category you choose. The disadvantage of this method (as compared to the one outlined in the procedure) is that you must be able to see the tag and category or sub-category in the Keyword Tags panel. Since the Keyword Tags panel can get filled with categories quickly, it may require that you do quite a bit of scrolling and searching, whereas the Category menu in the Edit Keyword Tag dialog gives you a list of every category and sub-category in one convenient place.
To view photos belonging to a category or sub-category:
In the Keyword Tags panel, do one of the following:
• Double-click a category or sub-category.
• Click the blank box to the left of a category or sub-category.
A small binoculars icon appears in the box, and the Photo Browser changes to display just the photos in that category or sub-category set.
To return to the main Photo Browser window, click the Show All button, or click the binoculars icon in the Keyword Tags panel.
To delete a category or sub-category:
In the Keyword Tags panel, click a category or sub-category, and then do one of the following:
• Right-click to display the category contextual menu, and then select Delete (category name) category.
• Click the Delete icon at the top of the Keyword Tags panel .
Before you delete a category or sub-category, bear in mind that you will also delete all related sub-categories and tags and will remove those tags from all tagged photos. In some circumstances, a better alternative may be to change a category or sub-category’s properties to better match the content or theme of related tagged photos.
Photos have gone digital, but we don’t have to discard our analog thinking. Just as you store Polaroids and prints in a photo album, you can collect your digital photos in Elements albums.
An album can be composed of photos from several different tags or categories. Plus, the photos within albums can be sorted and reordered, independent of their date or folder structure—particularly useful when you’re creating a project such as a PDF slide show or Web photo gallery.
To create a new album:
To create an album from a folder:
The album is created with the name of the folder .
To view a photo album:
Click an album name in the Albums panel. The Photo Browser displays only the photos in that album .
To view your entire catalog, click the Show All button.
To add photos to an album:
Do one of the following:
• From the Photo Browser, drag a photo onto the appropriate album in the Albums panel.
• From the Albums panel, drag an album onto a photo thumbnail in the Photo Browser . An album icon appears below the photo in the Browser window to indicate it is part of an album.
Or
To rename an album:
To arrange photos within an album:
Or
To remove photos from an album:
With an album displayed in the Photo Browser, select a photo thumbnail and then do one of the following:
• Right-click on the album icon below the photo thumbnail and select Remove from (name of album) Album from the contextual menu .
• Right-click inside a photo thumbnail, and then from the contextual menu choose Remove from Album > (name of album).
Or
To create an album category:
You can also right-click an album name and choose Sort the Album by Date (Oldest First) from the contextual menu.
Your new album category appears at the bottom of the list in the Albums panel.
To add an album to an album category:
In the Albums panel, drag an album icon onto the name of the album category .
Or
To delete an album:
In the Albums panel, select an album and click the Delete icon.
Or
It’s possible to group one album category within another when creating a category. If you’ve already created an album category, its name appears in the Parent Album Category menu of the Create Album Category dialog. You then have the option of nesting your new album category within the existing one.
Deleting a shared album also removes it from public view at Photoshop.com, although the photos remain online.
One of my grandmother’s cupboards was filled with photo albums, organized roughly chronologically, along with a bunch of envelopes and stacks of free-floating pictures that weren’t in any order. The problem with lots of photos is that there’s only so much time you can spend sorting them.
But what if you had an assistant who could do the organizing for you? Not just once, but ongoing, changing the albums based on new photos or keyword tags or other criteria? Smart albums operate just like that (and they don’t mind the workload).
To create a smart album:
The other drop-down menu and field change depending on the criteria. For example, choosing Keyword Tags presents a list of tags.
To modify a smart album:
To create a smart album from search results:
If you give a modified smart album the same title as the original album you’re editing, Elements creates a brand new album instead of replacing the old one.
To easily view all photos except those in the smart album, go to the Options drop-down menu and choose Show results that do not match.
Although you can specify a keyword category or sub-category as criteria for a smart album, the Organizer only looks for media marked with that category tag, not the keyword tags that fall under the category.
When you’re looking over a set of photos, you want to see the photos, not everything else around them. The full-screen reviewing option lets you see just your images, with a minimal set of controls for ranking and sorting, and even for applying basic edits.
To review photos full screen:
You can also use the QuickEdit panel to make basic adjustments if you’re in a hurry.
If you apply a QuickEdit to a RAW image, you’re asked to save the edited version in a different file format, such as JPEG.
Click the tiny pushpin icon on the panels to toggle between remaining visible and automatically retracting to the edge of the screen.
To sort through your photos quickly, forget the panels and just type the keys 1-5 to apply ratings.
In addition to locating photos using keyword tags and albums, the Organizer offers a host of other options for finding and viewing photos in your catalog. I’ll touch on just a couple of the more popular methods here for locating photos by their embedded date information. For example, the text search capability takes advantage of the keyword tags you applied earlier.
To find photos using a text search:
• Type a term into the Search field in the Options bar. The Photo Browser searches the photos’ metadata and displays matches as you type .
• The Organizer is smart enough to understand the operators AND, OR, and NOT, which allow you to quickly narrow your search .
• For more specific searching, enter any of the following search tags into the field. For example, typing make:canon
(note the lack of a space after the colon) finds all photos in my library shot using a Canon camera. You can also group tags to narrow the results .
• tag:
• filename:
• caption:
• make:
• model:
• author:
• notes:
• date: ##/##
(month/day, depending on date preferences in Organizer)
• date: ####
(year)
• date:
(today, yesterday
, lastweek
, thisyear
, or lastyear
)
To find photos using the timeline:
To display photos within a date range:
To quickly search by attributes:
Drag keyword tags, albums, or other criteria to the Find bar at the top of the Photo Browser .
When you drag photos to the Find bar, Elements displays images with similar qualities such as color.
To find photos in the date view:
In Year view, dates shaded in blue indicate the days those photos were taken. A preview window to the right contains a thumbnail of the first photo in the set, plus navigation buttons to view the remaining photos in the set . In Month view, thumbnails appear on the dates the photos were taken.
• Double-click either a shaded day in Year view or a day thumbnail in Month view.
• Click to select a day in either Year or Month view, and then click the Day button at the bottom of the Date View window.
In the Day View window you can see large, single-image views of your photos . You can also add notes for a complete day’s set of photos and enter a caption for individual photos.
From the Find menu, you can search for photos to view by a number of different criteria. Some that you’ll probably use most often are by caption or note; by filename; by history (imported on date, and printed on date, among others); and by media type (photos, video, audio, and creations). Just choose an option and then fill in its dialog (when applicable) to refine your search.
You’ve spent a day on the valley floor of Yosemite shooting picture after picture, and when you return home in the evening and download all of those photos to your Photo Browser, you realize you have about a dozen shots of the same waterfall: some lit a little differently than others; some with different zoom settings; but all similar.
Stacks serve as a convenient way to group those related photos together. They not only save valuable space in the Photo Browser, they also make assigning tags much faster, because tagging a stack automatically tags every photo in the stack. When you’re ready to take a careful look at all of those waterfalls and weed out the greats from the not-so-greats, you simply expand the stack to view all of the stacked photos at once.
To create a stack:
The photos are stacked together, indicated by a Stack icon in the upper-right corner of the top photo in the stack .
To view all photos in a stack:
In the Photo Browser, click the arrow icon at the right of the stack. Or, choose Edit > Stack > Expand Photos in Stack; or press Ctrl+Alt+R. The photos in the stack appear .
To flatten a stack:
You can also choose to delete the associated image files from your hard disk.
To unstack photos in a stack:
Choose Edit > Stack > Unstack Photos.
The stacked photos return to their original locations in the Photo Browser window.
While you’re viewing the expanded stack, you can also remove specific photos from a stack, or designate a new photo to be the top photo (the photo that appears at the top of the stack in the Photo Browser). Just right-click on any stacked photo and then, from the thumbnail contextual menu, select an option from the Stack submenu.
Sometimes where you took a photo is as important as what’s in the image. The Map feature lets you associate locations with your photos, using support from Yahoo! Maps .
To place a photo on the map:
A red pushpin icon appears in the Map pane at the location you specified. Clicking the icon displays the photo .
You can also choose Show Map from the Display drop-down menu to view the Map pane and then simply drag photos to a location on the map to place them. However, the steps above make it easier to find specific locations, versus dropping a bunch of pictures onto “North America” and calling it good.
When creating tags, click the Place on Map button to specify a location in the Map pane. Any photo assigned that tag automatically appears on the map.
The pop-up menu at the lower-right corner of the Map pane lets you display a traditional map, a satellite image, or a hybrid version (satellite with street names superimposed over it).
To move a location on the map:
Right-click a pushpin icon and choose Place on Map; follow the directions on the previous page.
Or
All photos associated with that location are marked with the new location.
To remove a photo from the map:
In the Map pane, right-click a pushpin icon and choose Remove from Map .
Catalogs are the behind-the-scenes backbone of the Organizer workspace, where all the information for tags and categories and albums are stored. When you install Elements, a default catalog (called My Catalog) is set up for you. That might be enough to work with, but you can also create additional catalogs—for example, if more than one person is using the same computer. You may want discrete catalogs for each person’s photos: Bob’s Catalog, Sara’s Catalog, and so on.
To create a new catalog:
If online backups are enabled for your existing catalog, a warning dialog appears stating you’ll need to set the new catalog to be backed up in the Backup/Sync preferences (see the next section). Click OK to continue.
At the bottom of the naming dialog is the Import free music into this catalog checkbox. Leave this option selected so the music files you received with Elements (to use as background tracks for PDF slide shows and other creations) will be available in the new catalog.
To access saved catalogs:
To make a backup of a catalog:
To restore a catalog from backup:
.tly
file that accompanies the backup.
Restoring a catalog isn’t just for when disaster strikes. If you need to move a catalog to another computer, create a full backup first, and then use the Restore feature in Photoshop Elements on the other machine.
The capability to back up your catalog to an external hard disk or removable media has one limitation: You need to actually do it. And speaking from experience, that’s something easily forgotten or put off for another day. But hard drives don’t fail on a schedule, and thieves don’t wait to pilfer your laptop until it’s most convenient for you.
I covered the basics of the integration between Elements and Photoshop.com in Chapter 1. With an account set up, you can direct Elements to back up your photos over the Internet in the background. Even if your computer perishes in a natural disaster, your photos are safe on Adobe’s servers.
Elements also synchronizes your backup. If you make a change to a photo in your library or online, the change is reflected in both locations.
To set up Photoshop.com backups:
You can also click the synchronization status icon at the bottom of the Organizer screen and choose Open Backup/Synchronization preferences from the pop-up menu that appears .
Elements primarily organizes online backups by album. This approach cuts the amount of data transferred (since image files tend to be quite large) and lets you decide which photos are backed up.
To enable an album for online backup:
Elements copies the images to the Photoshop.com servers in the background while you perform other tasks.
To view the backup status:
Click the synchronization status icon and choose one of the first three items in the menu to display: files that have been backed up; files that are not set for backup; or files that are due to be backed up. The photos appear in the Photo Browser.
New albums are automatically set to be backed up. To turn off this behavior, disable the New Albums Will Backup/Sync Automatically checkbox in the Backup/Synchronization preferences under Advanced Backup/Sync Options.
To control when backups occur:
• Click the synchronization status icon and choose Pause Backup/Synchronization from the status icon pop-up menu to temporarily halt copying. Use this command when you want to maximize your Internet bandwidth for other tasks.
• Click the Elements Organizer menu bar item and choose one of the following options :
• Backup/Sync only when idle: Elements copies files only when you’re not using the computer.
• Backup/Sync Now: Synchronize immediately.
• Pause Backup/Synchronization: Temporarily halts copying.
• Stop Backup/Synchronization: Disables the Backup/Sync is On setting in the Elements preferences and ends the agent. You must go back to the preferences to restart the service.
To stop backing up an album:
When you turn off backup/synchronization, Elements no longer communicates with Photoshop.com about the photos in that album. However, the images still remain online; if you want to delete them from Photoshop.com, you need to do so there.
To see what’s being transferred, choose View Backup/Synchronization Status from the synchronization status icon .
Communication between Elements and Photoshop.com goes both ways. When you edit a photo in Elements, the changes are automatically uploaded to your library at Photoshop.com and vice-versa. You can specify which albums are synchronized in the Backup/Synchronization preferences .
Here’s how synchronization works:
• Elements copies all files in an album to Photoshop.com. However, the online service only works with JPEG images, so if you want to edit a raw file, for example, Photoshop.com first converts the image.
• When you edit a file at Photoshop.com, the edited version is added to your Elements library as a new version; the original is still available.
• If you edit an image in Elements, only the most recent version of the file is uploaded to Photoshop.com . The original version exists only in your Elements library.
• If your Elements album contains a version set, only the “top” version (the latest) is uploaded to Photoshop.com, not all versions in the set.
• Removing a photo from an album in either Elements or Photoshop.com does not delete the file; it’s still available in the libraries at both locations.
• If you delete an album in Elements that you’ve shared (made public), the photos still reside at Photoshop.com but are no longer publicly available.
• If you delete a synchronized photo from Photoshop.com, Elements alerts you that a synchronization problem exists (see below). You can remove this confirmation step by disabling the preference labeled When I Delete a File Online, Ask Before Deleting It from My Computer.
• If you edit several different aspects of a photo—for example, adding a caption at Photoshop.com and applying keywords in Elements—those changes are merged so that each version is the same.
Sometimes synchronization isn’t straightforward. What happens when you add a caption to a photo in Elements and then accidentally add a different caption for the same photo at Photoshop.com? The synchronization status icon turns yellow to indicate a conflict.
To resolve synchronization issues:
If you’ve deleted a file from the library (not just removed it from an album), as I mentioned above, the Deletions tab lets you confirm or reject the deletion.
Photoshop.com doesn’t automatically update its library when you’re viewing an album online. If you’re expecting synchronized files to appear, click the Refresh button to update the library .
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