Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Browsing Photos in the Organizer

The Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of your projects for sharing your photos. You can see thumbnails of all your photos in the Organizer, and assign special keywords (called tags and categories) to make it easier to find the pictures you want. You can also gather photos into groups (called collections), and search for photos in all kinds of different ways.

The Organizer has three main windows: Photo Browser, Date View, and Create. The Photo Browser is the most versatile of the three and your main Organizer workspace.

Note

The Create window is where you make calendars, greeting cards, album pages, and other fun stuff, as described in Part 4 of this book.

A Tour of the Photo Browser

The Photo Browser may look a little intimidating the first time you see it, but it’s actually laid out quite logically. Figure 8-2 shows the Photo Browser’s main components. In the main part of the window, you see thumbnails of all the photos you’ve imported (Adobe calls this area the Image Well).

You have a lot of control over what you see in the Image Well via the View menu. For example, if you have a lot of photos in front of you, then you can put them in chronological order by choosing View → Arrangement → Date (newest first or oldest first). To see a larger, slideshow-like view of your photos and choose the ones you want to print or edit, choose View → View Photos in Full Screen or View → Compare Photos Side by Side.

Figure 8-2. You can ...