Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Creating Collections

You can also group your photos into collections, which are handy containers for storing multiple pictures. Collections are great for gathering together pictures taken at a particular event. They can also be used to prepare groups of photos that you plan on using in one of the Create projects, like slideshows or Web Galleries (covered in Chapter 17).

Collections can hold as many pictures as you want to put in them; and individual pictures can be included in multiple collections. Photos inside a collection can appear in any order you choose, which is important, for instance, if you want to control the order of photos in a slideshow.

You work with collections very much the way you do with tags, but you start by clicking the Collections tab in the Organize bin. From there, the steps are similar to those for creating or editing a tag or category, as outlined in the previous section.

Tip

For the most part, use Collections for creating temporary groups of pictures that you plan on using in specific projects. They’re also handy for gathering together groups of photos you want to export for use with another program. The best way to create permanent groupings of your photos is to assign the same tag to all the photos in the group.