Keeping Track (Photoshop Elements) Part 2

USING SMART TAGS

Using keyword tags is a highly effective way to keep track of your photographs, but it can be a little time consuming. The Organizer has the ability to apply Smart Tags, which will help you quickly organize your images without having to get into specific keyword tags. If you look in the Keyword Tags section of the Organizer, you will see the Smart Tags label at the bottom of the list (Figure 2.10).

Click the disclosure triangle to see a list of Smart Tags that can be applied to your images. To apply a Smart Tag, you have to let the Organizer analyze your images first. To do this, select the images you want analyzed in the Media Browser, right-click, and choose Run Auto-Analyzer from the pop-up menu. Depending on the number of images that you have selected, this process can take a little while.

A progress bar will appear, letting you know where the Organizer is in the analyzing process. When the process is complete, you will see a small tag icon in the lower-right corner of each selected thumbnail. Go to the Smart Tags list in the Keyword Tags section and click the check boxes located to the left of each Smart Tag to see the images that received that tag in the Media Browser window. If no images received a particular tag, then the Media Browser window will be empty.

So how do you find out what tags were assigned to each image? The easy way is to position the mouse pointer over the top of the tag icon for one of the tagged images. As you hover over the tag icon, a label will appear, telling you which Smart Tags are assigned to that particular image. If you want to remove any of the tags that were applied during the Auto-Analyzer process, right-click the tag icon for the thumbnail and then select whichever tag you want removed.


Elements has several Smart Tags that can be automatically applied to your photos.

FIGURE 2.10

Elements has several Smart Tags that can be automatically applied to your photos.

SELECTING IMAGES IN THE MEDIA BROWSER

There are a few ways to select images in the Media Browser. To select one image, click its thumbnail. To select multiple images that are not contiguous, click the first thumbnail and then hold the Control key (Command key on a Mac) while clicking additional photographs. To select a consecutive group of images, click the first image, scroll down to the last image you want to select, hold the Shift key, and click the last image; this will select everything from the first image down to the last image selected. If you want to select all of your images, use the keyboard shortcut Control-A (Command-A). To deselect, press Shift-Control-A (Shift-Command-A). All of these commands can also be found under the Edit menu.

Sorting images

It makes no sense to tag photographs if they aren’t worth keeping. For that reason, we should probably discuss how to sort your images into two categories: those that you want to keep, and those that need to go in the trash. Performing this sorting process is good for a couple of reasons. First, it lets you focus on just those photographs that are keepers, while ignoring the poorer ones. Second, by identifying those photographs that you don’t want to keep, you can delete them and recover some hard drive space.

The easiest way to sort through your images is to use the star rating system. You need to come up with your own system for rating your photographs, but the way I do it is to assign one star for those images that I want to delete and five stars for my definite keepers. Of course, you can choose to assign two, three, or four stars.

The first thing I do after importing new images is navigate to the first image and change the viewing mode of the Media Browser to Single Photo view. You do this by clicking the Single Photo View icon or dragging the thumbnail scaling slider all the way to the right. Now that I have made a larger view of my image, I press either the 1 key or the 5 key on the keyboard to assign one or five stars to the image. I can then use the left or right arrow keys to quickly view my images and assign a star rating to them. After I’ve assigned a star rating to all of the imported photographs, I switch back to a thumbnail view for the next step in the sorting process (Figure 2.11).

Thumbnails displaying their star ratings.

FIGURE 2.11

Thumbnails displaying their star ratings.

Now I can filter by the number of stars assigned to the image. I do this by clicking the star filter in the upper-right corner of the Media Browser. To find all of the images I want to delete, I click one star in the filter and then choose Only from the drop-down menu. Now I have a thumbnail view of all of the images I want to delete (Figure 2.12). To get rid of them, I click and drag across the images to select them, or click the first one and then click the last one while holding down the Shift key. The final step is to press the Delete key to remove the images from the Media Browser. Since we’ve already established that these are not keepers, it makes no sense to remove them from the Media Browser without also removing them from the hard drive, so I also select the "Also delete selected item(s) from the hard disk" check box (Figure 2.13). I click OK to delete the images from the catalog as well as from the hard drive.

Clicking one star in the filter will hide all photos with a different rating.

FIGURE 2.12

Clicking one star in the filter will hide all photos with a different rating.

Select the check box to delete the images from the hard drive.

FIGURE 2.13

Select the check box to delete the images from the hard drive.

The Create Album Category options.

FIGURE 2.14

The Create Album Category options.

After I’ve eliminated all of my bad images, I go back to the filter and click the five-stars filter. Now that I no longer need to sort my images, I can remove the star ratings by selecting all of the images and pressing the 0 (zero) key. Of course, you may choose to use the stars for your own rating system. It’s completely up to you.

CREATING ALBUMS

Albums are a way of grouping your images into meaningful collections. You can create albums for just about any purpose. They’re not tied to any specific folder on your hard drive or any group of photographs, but they are a way for you to group meaningful images into one collection. And just like with keyword tags, you can use parent albums and subalbums to further organize your files. Let’s say you want to create an album called Birthdays. You might then create sub-albums for Johnny and Mary and whoever else you have birthday photos of. Or maybe you want to create a parent album called Vacations. Then every time you take a vacation, you can create a sub-album specifically for those photos and put them in the Vacations album. You might also want to create parent albums for specific purposes. Let’s say you’re collecting images that you want to put up on a Web site. You could create an album called For the Web and then add the desired images from your catalog.

I like to lead and participate in photowalks. In order to help me locate and organize my photowalk images, I’m going to create a couple of albums. The first order of business is creating the parent album category. Here’s how the process would go.

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