2. Organizing Your Photo Collection

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to organize your photos into stacks and albums and apply star ratings and keyword tags to images so that you can locate them easily later on.

Photoshop Elements makes it easy to keep your photos organized, with no clutter and very little effort. The point of organizing your photos is to be able to find what you want when you want it. Through the Organizer, Photoshop Elements offers several ways you can classify and group images so that you’ll be able to find them later on (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. You can tell at a glance which organizing methods you’ve applied to a photo.

• Albums are for grouping related photos together—for example, all the pictures from your family barbecue last month or all the “product shots” you’ve taken to use with eBay auctions.

• Stacks enable you to combine photos that are visually similar into a group that takes up only one “slot” in the Organizer. You might stack up several versions of a group photo, for instance. (“Hang on, just one more—Grandma had her eyes closed the last time.”)

• Keywords can be assigned to photos to identify people, locations, events, organizations, or anything else that helps describe the photos’ contents.

• Ratings help you keep track of the photos you like best—and the ones you like least.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use all of these features to identify the photos in your collection. Then, in the following chapter, you’ll see how you can take advantage of all the data you’ve given Organizer about your photos to find just the images you want at any given time.

Grouping Related Photos into Albums

Think of the Organizer’s main catalog window, which is called the Photo Browser, as a giant shoebox full of your images. Granted, the Organizer is a lot smarter than a shoebox, so you can do things like find photos by date or even by looking for images similar to the one you’ve selected. But when it’s time to actually sit down and look at your photos, for the most part, you’re going to want to flip through organized, themed photo albums. Shuffling your photos into albums of related images is useful for two reasons:

• If you want to look at all the pictures taken on a particular occasion, the quickest way to access the whole group is to click an album name—assuming you’ve taken the time to sort them into an album previously.

• An album is the typical starting point for printing photos, creating a web gallery, or working on another photo project that requires multiple images.

Creating Albums

You can set up as many albums as you like in Photoshop Elements, and each photo can be in as many albums as is appropriate—there’s no limit. To create a new album, click the Add button at the top of the Albums panel on the right side of the screen. From the pop-up menu, choose New Album (see Figure 2.2). If any photos are selected, Photoshop Elements automatically adds them to the new album, and then it asks you to name the album and assign it to a category (see Figure 2.3). If you haven’t set up any categories yet, don’t worry; a category isn’t required.

Figure 2.2. All the controls you need to create and work albums are right there in the Albums panel.

Figure 2.3. If you start creating a lot of albums, you may want to group them into categories.

Check the Backup/Synchronize box if you have a Photoshop.com account and want to back your albums up online. (We’ll talk more about how this works and why you’d want to use Photoshop.com in Chapter 4, “Maintaining Your Photo Collection.”) At this point, you can add more photos to your album by simply dragging them into the Albums panel. When you’ve got the album set up the way you want it, click Done.

Your new album is now listed below the “Last 6 Months” album in the Albums panel. To view its contents, all you have to do is click its name. Then, if you want to see your whole photo collection again, click Show All at the top of the photo panel (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4. The current album’s name appears at the top of the Photo Browser, with a Show All button next to it that displays your entire collection.

To change an album’s name or modify its other attributes after you’ve created it, just click its name in the Albums panel and click the Edit button (marked with a pencil icon). You’ll see the same dialog that appeared when you first created the album, and you can change any of its settings.

Working with Photos in Albums

The Organizer’s albums aren’t set in stone; you can change their contents by adding, deleting, and reordering photos at any time. Like most functions in Photoshop Elements, adding photos to an album can be accomplished in more than one way, as can deleting them. The simplest way to add an image to an album is just to select the photo and drag it on top of the album’s name in the Album panel. The name lights up, you release the mouse button, and the photo is immediately added to the album. You can tell this has happened because Photoshop Elements places a green album icon below the picture in the Photo Browser (see Figure 2.5). Interestingly, you can also add a picture to an album in exactly the opposite way: Just click and drag an album from the Albums panel on top of the photo thumbnail.

Figure 2.5. The green album icon indicates that a photo has been added to at least one album.

Removing photos from an album is slightly more complicated than adding them. The quickest way to do it is to select the photo, or multiple photos, and right-click the green Album icon under one of the thumbnails. The only command is Remove from (Album Name) Album. When you choose this command, there’s no confirmation dialog; the photos are removed from the album immediately. The Remove from Album command, with a submenu of available albums, also appears in the contextual menu that you see if you right-click the photo thumbnail itself, down near the bottom of the menu.

To change the order of photos in an album, just drag and drop them into the order you prefer. If you’d like to see them in chronological order, just choose Date (Newest First) or Date (Oldest First) from the Album order pop-up menu in the toolbar above the Photo Browser (see Figure 2.6). Then you can switch back to your custom order by choosing Album Order again from the menu.

Figure 2.6. Your options for an album’s viewing order are fairly limited.

Once you’ve completed an album, you can display it as a slide show by clicking the View, Edit, Organize in Full Screen button on the toolbar next to the Album Order menu. This brings up the first photo in the album—using the Album Order you set—in full-screen size with three floating panels over it (see Figure 2.7). The Quick Edit and Quick Organize panels contain the same editing and organizing functions found elsewhere in Photoshop Elements, and they allow you to use these functions without the distraction of the program’s interface: no toolbar, no panels, and so on. The third panel enables you to control the appearance of your photos in full-screen mode, as follows:

• Toggle Film Strip—This button hides and shows a “film strip” display of the other photos in the current album on the right side of the screen. Press Ctrl-F to accomplish the same thing with a keyboard shortcut.

• Toggle Quick Edit Panel—Click this button to hide and show the Quick Edit panel.

• Toggle Quick Organize Panel—Click here to hide and show the Quick Organize panel.

• Previous/Next Media—These “back” and “forward” buttons enable you to shift from image to image within the current album or your collection; you can also use the left and right arrows on your keyboard.

• Play—Click here to start a quick-and-dirty slide show of the selected images.

• Open Settings Dialog—This button shows you a variety of settings affecting how the slide show plays (see Figure 2.8).

• Transitions—Click here to choose a transition effect for your slide show.

• Toggle Properties Panel—If you click this button, you’ll show or hide a fourth panel that contains basic information about the current image.

• Full Screen View—This button is already active. If you switch to side by side view (the next button), click here or press F11 to return to full screen view.

• Side by Side View—Click here to view two images at once, so you can compare them (see Figure 2.9).

• Sync Panning and Zooming in Side by Side View—Clicking this button synchronizes the onscreen movement of the two images, so if you zoom in on one, the other automatically zooms, too. And whenever you’re zoomed in enough that the whole photo isn’t visible in its assigned half of the screen, moving the image with the Hand tool moves the other picture along with it.

Figure 2.7. You can use full-screen mode for editing images or to display a slide show with a minimum of setup.

Figure 2.8. You can choose any MP3 file as background music for the slide show; click Browse to locate the file you want to use.

Figure 2.9. Side by side view is a great way to work through a group of photos to choose your favorite.

Click the X (Exit) at the rightmost end of the slide show panel (or press Esc) when you’re ready to dismiss full-screen mode and return to the normal Organizer view.

LET ME TRY IT

Setting Up Smart Albums

Albums are great, but they do require some maintenance. Smart albums, on the other hand, update and arrange themselves. After you’ve set them up, your work is done. You start out by setting criteria for inclusion in the new smart album, such as “pictures taken by my camera in August of 2009.” Then, the Organizer constantly scans the contents of your photo catalog and adds any image that meets your criteria to the smart album, so that the smart album is always up-to-date.

Follow these steps to create a new smart album:

1. In the Albums panel, click the Add button and choose New Smart Album from the pop-up menu (see Figure 2.10).
   

   Figure 2.10. All the controls you need to work with both regular and smart albums are in the Albums panel.

   

2. In the New Smart Album dialog, give your album a name, and then choose criteria for it. Choose your first category from the pop-up menu on the left, and then choose the appropriate option from the middle menu. These options vary depending on the type of data you’re dealing with (text, a date, or a numeric value); for example, you might see Contains and Does Not Contain, or Is and Is Not. Then enter the parameter you want to use in the pop-up menu on the right.
   

   Here I’ve set the album to look for pictures taken by my own camera (as opposed to downloaded, emailed, or created-from-scratch images) that have five-star ratings and were taken during the year 2009 (see Figure 2.11).

   Figure 2.11. You can combine criteria in thousands of ways.

   

3. Click OK to create the album. That’s all there is to it; you can view the album’s contents by clicking its name in the Albums panel, just like a regular album. You can’t drag the pictures around to change their order, however; you’re stuck with Date (Newest First) or Date (Oldest First) as your only choices.

Making Stacks of Similar Photos

Stacks offer you a way to compact piles of very similar photos into a single thumbnail in your photo catalog. All the photos are still there, and you can see them all with a single click, but they’re not cluttering up the Photo Browser. This makes it a lot easier to see all the different images that the catalog contains, because your screen isn’t cluttered with a bunch of near-duplicates.

Stacking and Unstacking

To make a stack, first select all the photos you want to include in it. They don’t have to be next to each other in the Photo Browser. Ctrl-click to select single photos in any order, or click and drag to select a batch that are all right next to each other. Right-click any of the selected images and choose Stack, Stack Selected Photos from the pop-up menu (see Figure 2.12). You’ll find the same command in the Edit menu on the menu bar; feel free to use that one if you’re not a fan of contextual menus.

Figure 2.12. Many commands in Photoshop Elements appear in both contextual menus and regular menus; use whichever you prefer.

Once the images are stacked together, only one appears in the Photo Browser, surrounded by a lighter gray rectangle that makes it stand out a bit from the background (see Figure 2.13). You can unstack images by right-clicking the stack and returning to the Stack command on the contextual menu (or you can use the Edit menu if you prefer). You’ll find that it contains a new command: Unstack Photos.

Figure 2.13. When there’s no need to see all of a group of similar photos, it makes sense to reduce them to a single image as shown here.

Viewing Stacks

If you click the arrow on the right side of this gray rectangle, the stack opens up and you can see all the photos (see Figure 2.14). At this point, you can click one or more photos within the stack to work with it. You can also choose which photo appears on top of the stack; click it to select it, and choose Stack, Set as Top Photo from either the contextual menu or the Edit menu.

Figure 2.14. Expanding a stack so you can see its contents takes just one click.

Applying Keyword Tags

Keyword tags are descriptive words and phrases that you can assign to photos to make it easier to find what you want when you want it. You can organize your tags in categories and subcategories (this assumes you get really dedicated about tagging your photos and end up with dozens of tags), and you can apply as many tags to a photo as you want. Once your photos are tagged, you can use those tags to search for images of particular subjects or with specific characteristics. Smart albums, for instance, can use tags as criteria for inclusion within albums.

Creating Tags

Setting up your tags is a simple procedure: Just click the Add button in the Keyword Tags panel and choose New Keyword Tag, New Sub-category, or New Category (see Figure 2.15). Photoshop Elements starts you out with a default set of categories—People, Places, Events, and Other—that you can use, delete, or ignore, as you wish. If you stick with these preset categories, subcategories or keyword tags within them might include Family, Friends, and Coworkers; Home, Work, and School; and Holidays, Birthdays, and Vacations. Make these latter items keyword tags if you don’t want to get any more specific, or make them subcategories if you then want to include more specific tags within them, such as Halloween, Labor Day, and Valentine’s Day.

Figure 2.15. Each tag must be assigned to a category; subcategories are optional.

Creating a keyword tag, category, or subcategory is much the same process. In each case, the most important piece of information you need to enter is simply the name. Then, of course, you need to assign each tag and each subcategory a category (see Figure 2.16). Aside from that, you can attach a few other bits of information to keyword tags and categories.

Figure 2.16. The Create Keyword Tag, Create Sub-category, and Create Category dialog boxes look fairly similar.

First, you can associate a location with a keyword tag. This enables you to locate your photos in the Organizer’s Map view, which shows you red “push pin” icons marking the location of each photo. You can set photo locations individually, too, but it’s much quicker to assign locations to tags and then assign tags to photos. The second bit of data you can add to a keyword tag is a note, which can say anything you want. You can use this feature to add more specific data about the tag’s subject; for example, a Boy Scouts tag might have the note “Troop 43, Mount Webster Council.” And finally, you get to choose from 23 different icons for categories.

LET ME TRY IT

Modifying Tags and Categories

Working out all the tags and tag categories you’ll ever need at one time is practically impossible. Most people’s organizational needs change over time; if yours do, you’ll need to change your tags and categories. Fortunately, this process is just as easy as creating the tags in the first place. Follow these steps in the Keyword Tags panel:

1. Choose Keyword Tags from the Window menu to display the Keyword Tags panel.
2. To move tags or sub-categories into a different category, Ctrl-click to choose the items you want to move, then drag and drop them onto a different category.
3. If you want to change a tag or category’s attributes (its name, color or icon), click the item (you can only edit one at a time).
4. Click the Add button, and then click the Edit command in the pop-up menu. This returns you to the same dialog box you used to create the tag or category in the first place (shown in Figure 2.16), only it says “Edit” at the top instead of “Create.”
5. For categories, set attributes in the Edit Category dialog, as follows:
   

   • Choose a different color by clicking Choose Color.

   • Type a new name in the Category Name text entry field.

   • Click an icon in the Category Icon list.

6. For Keyword Tags, set attributes in the Edit Keyword Tag dialog, as follows:
   

   • Click Edit Icon to modify or replace the tag’s icon picture.

   • Move the tag to a different category by choosing one from the Category pop-up menu.

   • Type a new name in the Name text entry field.

   • Click Place on Map to assign a geographical location to the tag.

   • Add text in the Note text entry field if you want to store additional information about the tag.

7. Click OK when you’re done.

LET ME TRY IT

Tagging Photos

After you’ve created your keyword tags, you can apply them to your photos in any of several ways:

• Drag a tag from the Keyword Tags panel to a selected photo or photos.

• Drag one or more photos to a tag in the Keyword Tags panel.

• Type in a new tag name at the top of the Keyword Tags panel and click Apply to simultaneously create and apply the tag.

When you’ve applied a tag using any of these methods, the tag’s icon appears below the image’s thumbnail in the Photo Browser. You can apply as many tags as you like to an image, and each one will add its own icon below the image’s thumbnail. You can choose a color for category icons and change subcategory icons to any of 23 built-in choices by clicking Edit Icon in the Create Sub-category or Edit Sub-category dialog. Keyword tag icons, however, contain a tiny version of the first picture to which you assign them. Here’s how you can change those icons:

1. Click the tag in the Keyword Tags panel and click the Add button, and then choose Edit from the pop-up menu.
2. In the Edit Keyword Tag dialog, click Edit Icon.
3. In the Edit Keyword Tag Icon dialog, drag the selection marquee by a corner to choose the portion of the image that’s used as the icon (see Figure 2.17).
   

   Figure 2.17. Because keyword tag icons are so small in the Photo Browser, you’ll want to zoom in on a detail of the photo that will be recognizable even when it’s tiny.

   

4. If you want to use part of another image, click the arrow buttons to choose the image, then adjust the selection marquee for the one you pick.
5. Click OK to apply your changes.

Rating Your Favorite Pictures

Everyone’s a critic, right? Here’s your chance to make it perfectly clear what you think about every photo in your catalog. Star ratings are a great way to mark photos that you’ll want to study later for inspiration or ones that you plan to use in future projects, even if you don’t know yet what those projects will be, because they’re too good not to. It’s easy to apply and change ratings.

Applying Star Ratings

Each picture in the Photo Organizer starts out with a row of five tiny gray stars below it. This indicates that the photo in question doesn’t have a rating. As you move the cursor over the stars from left to right, more stars light up (see Figure 2.18). Click when the right number of larger yellow stars appears to apply that rating. It truly couldn’t be simpler.

Figure 2.18. Setting star ratings is so easy that you may find yourself doing it accidentally on occasion.

Modifying and Removing Star Ratings

To change a rating, click the star that you want to make the highest star. In other words, to switch from a five-star rating to a two-star rating, click the second star from the left. Or, if you want to remove the star rating altogether from a photo, click the highest, or rightmost, yellow star in its rating. To change the ratings of multiple photos simultaneously, just select them, right-click, and then choose Ratings from the pop-up menu (see Figure 2.19). The Ratings submenu contains all the possible ratings you could apply, from No Rating to 5 Stars.

Figure 2.19. You don’t have to rate a photo; No Rating is a perfectly reasonable choice.

Recognizing People

One of the greatest challenges in getting photos truly organized is labeling them with the names of all the people in them. In the days of paper prints, we wrote on the back of the picture, next to it on an album page, or sometimes right over the image. Photoshop Elements makes that process much less painful in two ways. First, it finds faces within pictures for you. Then, after you’ve labeled some faces, the program starts to assign names to faces you haven’t labeled. Of course, you get a chance to confirm whether the software has guessed right.

After you’ve tagged photos with people’s names, of course, you can then find all the pictures of that person in your catalog with a single click, and you can use people’s names as the basis for a smart album. It’s worth putting in a little effort now to reap the rewards later on.

Recognizing Faces in Existing Photos

If you’ve tagged photos on Facebook, or used a similar interface elsewhere, you’ll recognize the face tagging process immediately. Start by selecting a photo, and then click the Start People Recognition button in the Keyword Tags panel (see Figure 2.20).

Figure 2.20. The Start People Recognition button looks like an old-school Polaroid photo.

You may have noticed the Organizer asking you “Who is this?” and placing a white box around someone’s face in a photo. This happens any time you leave the Organizer open for a while without doing anything. If you click the label, enter a person’s name, and press Enter, Photoshop Elements labels this face and adds a keyword tag for that person within the People category in the Keyword Tags panel. When you view all the images containing that keyword tag, the faces are marked with the same white boxes.

LET ME TRY IT

Identifying Faces

After you label a photo this way, you may see a dialog asking whether you want to label more faces. Click OK to start, or click Cancel if you’re not in the mood; you can start people recognition any time by selecting the images you want to work with, right-clicking, and choosing Run Auto Analyzer or clicking the Start People Recognition button in the Keyword Tags panel. Any of these methods brings up the People Recognition dialog, with an image displayed for you to tag (see Figure 2.21). Once again, faces are indicated with white boxes. You can do any of the following:

1. Click the “Who is this? label below a face and type a name. As soon as you click elsewhere in the image, Photoshop Elements starts trying to find more pictures of the same person in your catalog.
2. Click the X in the upper-left corner of a face box to get rid of it, either because it’s not really a face or because you don’t want to label that person.
3. Click Add Missing Person to add another white box to the image, and then drag the box to a face you want to label. You can drag the box’s corners to adjust its size and shape if needed. Then click the “Who is this?” label and enter the correct name.
4. Click the arrows to move forward and backward through the group of images you selected. If Photoshop Elements suspects that it knows who a person is, you’ll see “Is this so-and-so?” below the white box instead of “Who is this?” (see Figure 2.22). Click the green check mark to confirm or the red X to enter a different name for that person.
5. Click Name More People to have Photoshop Elements pick out a batch of faces and display them as thumbnails for you to identify (see Figure 2.23). This means you won’t have the context of the entire photo, so you may be able to label some of these faces but not others. Click Save when you’ve labeled all the faces that you can. Then you’ll see more thumbnails. These are the ones that may not be faces at all—Photoshop Elements isn’t sure. Each has a red X on it. If you want to label one, click the red X to turn it into a green check mark, and then click Save again. You’ll alternate between labeling thumbnails and deciding which are and are not faces until all the selected images are labeled. You may also see a selection of thumbnails that Photoshop Elements thinks, on further reflection, might not be faces after all, and you can confirm or deny the program’s guess.
6. Click Done to move on to something else.

Figure 2.21. Photoshop Elements is surprisingly good at locating faces.

Figure 2.22. This face looks close enough to other shots of Thomas for Photoshop Elements to suspect that it’s him again.

Figure 2.23. You can click and drag in the Name People dialog to assign names to multiple faces at the same time.

You’ll find that the people recognition feature works best with head-on shots and hardly ever recognizes a profile as a person. If someone’s facing away from the camera in a picture, Photoshop Elements definitely won’t realize there’s a person there. But you can use the Add Missing Person feature to label these people as well as the ones that the software does pick up on.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about using face tagging along with metadata, keyword tags, and other information to find exactly the photo you want.