Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Using the Organizer

The Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of the projects that involve sharing photos with others (posting them online, for example). You can see thumbnails of all your photos in the Organizer, assign keywords (called tags) to make them easier to find, and search for them in lots of different ways. If you have a Photoshop.com account (Photoshop.com), that site also hosts a version of the Organizer that works just the way it does on your desktop.

The Media Browser is the Organizer's main window. Date view (Display → Date View, or press Ctrl+Alt+D) is a calendar-based system for looking at and searching for photos, as explained in Figure 2-9. But the Media Browser is more versatile: It's your main Organizer workspace, which is what the rest of this section is about.

The Organizer stores the information about your photos in a special database called a catalog. You don't have to do anything special—Elements creates your catalog (creatively 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 than one catalog at a time. If you really want to have more than one catalog, or if you ever want to start over with a new catalog, in the Organizer go to File → Catalog, and click the New button. Enter a name and then click OK.

Your catalog can include photos stored anywhere on your computer, and even photos that you've moved to external hard drives ...