Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Searching for Photos

When you first start importing photos into Elements, it’s easy enough to find the batch of photos you’re looking for by using the Timeline and the Folder Location panel (Figure 8-2). Once you have a few months worth of photos stored up, though, you’ll find it much easier to locate, say, that batch of pictures you took at a picnic last summer if you diligently assign tags to all or most of your photos. Elements makes it very easy to find tagged photos. Still, if you decide that there’s just not enough time in your current lifetime to follow a comprehensive tagging system, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Elements gives you another way to root out buried pictures—searching by a picture’s metadata (automatically saved photo stats with info on things like aperture setting and exposure). This section covers both.

Using Tags and Categories to Find Photos

Of course, when you’re looking for a particular picture, you can use all the previously listed ways to find photos (viewing by date, for example) and just keep clicking through groups of photos until you find the one you want. But searching by tags and categories is the easiest way to find a particular photo. Elements gives you two main ways to conduct these searches:

• Organize bin. Click the empty square next to a tag or category, and Elements finds all the photos associated with those tags and categories. (A pair of binoculars appears inside the square to indicate it’s being used to search for photos.) Click ...