Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2: Importing, Managing, and Saving Your Photos 43

Using the Organizer

Using 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, assign keywords (called tags) to make it easier to find the pictures you

want, and search for your photos in lots of different ways.

The Photo Browser is the main Organizer window. Date View is an alternate way

to look at and search for your photos, as explained in Figure 2-9. But the Photo

Browser is more versatile: It’s your main Organizer workspace, which is what the

rest of this section is about.

NOTE If you want to explore the Organizer in depth, check out Michael Slater’s books, Orga-

nize Your Photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements (Adobe Press), and his Web site, www.

photofanatic.com. Michael is the developer of the program that became Photoshop Album and

then the Elements Organizer. While his book hasn’t been updated since Elements 3, his Web site

may have an update for Elements 5.

The Organizer stores the information about your photos in a special database

called a catalog. You don’t have to do anything special to create this container—

Elements creates your catalog (named My Catalog) automatically the first time you

import photos. It’s possible to have more than one catalog, but most people don’t

because you can’t search more ...