Organizing Your Photos
How you organize your photos depends a lot on whether you're using a Windows PC or a Mac. In Windows, you can import and organize your images directly within Elements' Organizer program, while most Mac people will probably use iPhoto if they want to keep their photos organized.
Windows Organizer
If you're using Windows, the Organizer is where your photos come into Elements and go out again. The Organizer stores and catalogs your photos, and you automatically come back to it for any activities that involve sharing your photos, like printing a photo package or making a slideshow. The Organizer has three main sections, as shown in Figure 1-3:
Photo Browser lets you view your photos, sort them into collections, and assign keyword tags to them.
Date View is a fun feature that lets you see your photo imports organized by the date you brought them into the Organizer. It's even laid out like a calendar.
Create is where you come after you've finished editing your photos and are ready to use them in slideshows, album pages, greeting cards, and other projects.
The Organizer has lots of really cool features, and in the body of this book you'll meet them when they're relevant to the image-editing task at hand. The next chapter shows you how to use the Organizer to import and organize your photos, and Appendix A covers all the Organizer's different menu options.
Photo Downloader
Actually, the Windows version of Elements has one other component, which you might have seen already ...