Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Organizing Your Photos

The Organizer is where your photos come into Elements and go out again (when it's time to print or email them). 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 (Picture Package) or making a slideshow (Slideshows). The Organizer's main window (Figure 1-2), which is sometimes called the Media Browser, lets you view your photos, sort them into albums, and assign keyword labels to them. (In previous versions of Elements it was called the Photo Browser, so you may hear that term, too.)

The Organizer has lots of really cool features you'll learn about throughout this book when they're relevant to the 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. What's more, if you sign up for a Photoshop.com account (Photoshop.com), then you can access and organize your photos from any computer, not just at home.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Say Goodbye to the Welcome Screen

How do I get rid of the Welcome screen?

If you get to feeling welcomed enough, you probably want to turn off the Welcome screen so you don't have to click through it every time you start the program. In Elements 8, you can't: Every time you start Elements, you see the Welcome screen. There's a button in the upper-right corner of the Welcome screen that gives you some control ...