Keeping Track (Photoshop Elements) Part 1

HOW TO FIND THOSE PHOTOS MONTHS DOWN THE ROAD

Your photographs will be of no use if you cannot find them when you need them. This is why it is so important to be organized right from the start. Luckily, the Elements Organizer has a lot of tools to help keep your images neat and tidy.

In this topic, we are going to learn tasks like tagging, sorting, creating I albums, and stacking images. All of these will help you organize your images so that, in the future, you will have a much easier time finding & exactly the picture that you want to use. Not only that, but you will also have an easier method of getting rid of the photos that you don’t want.

Let’s jump into the Organizer and start sorting some images.

PORING OVER THE PICTÜRE

This image was captured late one afternoon on the San Francisco coast. I was out with some friends on a photo shoot, looking for some different vantage points from which to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge. We found this rocky slope with lots of little wildflowers, and I thought it might be a pretty good spot. My composition wasn’t bad, but as you can see from the inset image, my exposure was off a bit, probably because of the bright glare coming in from the left side of the frame. I managed to save the shot with a little image processing in Camera Raw and the Elements Editor.

TAGGING IMAGES WITH KEYWORDS

There are quite a few ways to find your photographs within the Organizer after you’ve imported them. One of my favorite ways to keep track of my images is to assign tags or keywords to them. Elements offers you several ways to do this, and it’s one of the easiest methods for quickly locating images by subject matter. One of the great things about tagging your images is that you can apply multiple keywords so that your images will show up in a variety of categories. So let’s say, for example, you like to take photographs of flowers. If you tag all of your flower photos with the keyword flower, you will then be able to see your entire collection of flower photos grouped together, even if they were shot and uploaded on different days. You can also assign multiple keywords so that you can be more specific in locating your images. For example, if you use the keywords flower and red every time you take a picture of a red flower, you can then locate all the similarly tagged images with just a few clicks of the mouse.


The Keyword Tags panel is in the Organize section.

FIGURE 2.1

The Keyword Tags panel is in the Organize section.

Under the Organize tab of the Elements Organizer, you will see a section called Keyword Tags. Adobe has created several presets in this section that you can use right away, but the real power of the program is in creating custom keywords that relate directly to your images (Figure 2.1).

The easiest way to create a custom keyword tag is to click inside the text box at the bottom of the Keyword Tags panel (Figure 2.2) and type the keyword that you want to use for your images. In the Media Browser, select the photos that you want to assign that keyword to. Then, click the Apply button to create the new tag and assign it to the images. You will notice that your new tag has been added as a sub-tag of the Other tag field.

One of the nice features of the text box is that it will dynamically show you existing keywords as you begin to type. So if you’ve already used the keyword Chinatown and you have additional images you want to tag with it, type the letter C into the text box and you will see the word Chinatown appear in a list above the text box. Then all you have to do is click the word to fill in the rest (Figure 2.3).

To add a custom keyword, just type it into the text box.

FIGURE 2.2

To add a custom keyword, just type it into the text box.

The real power of keyword tags is in the categories. Keywords can be sorted into broad categories and then narrowed down into sub-categories for greater sorting ability. For example, I like to travel a lot. To help keep track of my photos, I might want to have a parent category called Travel. Within that category, I could create a sub-category for each travel destination. This would make it much easier for me to locate the images that I want, rather than searching for the date that I actually traveled.

To create a new category, click the plus (+) icon under the Keyword Tags section and choose New Category. You can then choose the color of the tag, a category icon, and the name of the new category (Figure 2.4).

Typing in the text box will pull up a list of existing keywords.

FIGURE 2.3

Typing in the text box will pull up a list of existing keywords.

CREATING A CATEGORY

1.    Click the plus (+) icon, and then select New Category from the drop-down menu.

2.    Click Choose Color, and select a tag color from the color picker (A).

3.    Enter the new category name. In this instance, I type the word Travel (B).

4.    Finally, select a category icon (C) for the new tag, and click the OK button.

The category you created will now appear in the Keyword Tags list. If I want to create subcategories within this parent category (for instance, vacation or cruises), I follow the same procedure for creating the category, but I select New Sub-Category.

You can customize new keyword categories with the Create Category options.

FIGURE 2.4

You can customize new keyword categories with the Create Category options.

I type the name of the new sub-category, select the parent category, and click the OK button to finish. Depending on the level of organization that you want to achieve, you can create sub-categories within sub-categories. My preference is to create categories and then keywords that live within them. Your job is to find what works for you.

To create a keyword within a category, click the plus (+) icon and then select New Keyword Tag. The keyboard shortcut for doing this is Control-N (Command-N on a Mac). So why use the new keyword tag process if you can just type a new one like we did in the first example? The real benefit is that you get a lot more control over the information associated with that keyword tag.

By using the "create keyword tag" option, you can create a custom icon tag, assign the keyword to a category, name the keyword tag, and attach notes for more detailed information about the keyword. On my last trip to San Francisco, I took photographs in several different locations. Let’s create some sub-categories and keyword tags to help me better organize those photographs.

CREATING SUB-CATEGORIES AND KEYWORDS

1.    I want to create a new sub-category for the state that I visited, so I click the plus (+) icon and select New Sub-Category.

2.    I type California in the Sub-Category Name field and then select Travel as the parent category (Figure 2.5).

3.    I create a new sub-category, called San Francisco, that uses the new California tag as the parent (Figure 2.6).

4.    Next, I use the keyboard shortcut Control-N (Command-N) to bring up the New Keyword dialog.

5.    I type the new keyword Chinatown in the Name field (Figure 2.7).

6.    I click the OK button to finish creating the keyword tag.

7.    In the Media Browser, I select all of the images that I want to tag with this new keyword.

8.    Finally, I drag and drop the Chinatown tag onto my selected images so that it will be applied to all of them.

Creating a sub-category.

FIGURE 2.5

Creating a sub-category.

It's possible to have subcategories within sub-categories.

FIGURE 2.6

It’s possible to have subcategories within sub-categories.

Adding a new keyword to a category.

FIGURE 2.7

Adding a new keyword to a category.

After creating a custom keyword, you will see its tag in the keyword panel.

FIGURE 2.8

After creating a custom keyword, you will see its tag in the keyword panel.

Selecting a thumbnail image for the new keyword tag.

FIGURE 2.9

Selecting a thumbnail image for the new keyword tag.

When this process is complete you will see two things. First, you will see a new thumbnail icon appear in the keyword tag (Figure 2.8). To edit this thumbnail icon, right-click the keyword tag, select Edit Keyword Tag, click the Edit Icon button, and select the image of your choice from the tagged files in the Media Browser (Figure 2.9). Second, you should see a small icon in the lower-right corner of the large thumbnails in the Media Browser, which indicates that the images have been tagged.

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