4. Maintaining Your Photo Collection

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to back up your photo collection, access your images online, sync your collection among multiple computers, and access your photos from Adobe Premiere Elements for use in your movies.

Once you’ve got your photo collection set up, the next step is keeping it humming right along so that you don’t lose all the work you’ve put in. First and foremost, that means backing up your collection. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements provides a quick, easy, and free way to back up online, built right in to the program.

You’ll also want to extend access to your photos as far as possible, and there, too, Photoshop Elements has got you covered. Using the free Photoshop.com service, you can access your photos from any computer or other device with a web connection. You can also sync your photos among multiple computers in your home or office. Photoshop.com is available to anyone with a web browser, but it’s especially useful if you use Photoshop Elements because of the software’s direct connection to the service.

Finally, if you’re into movie-making with Adobe Premiere, you’ll surely want to be able to use your photos in Premiere as well as Photoshop Elements. The Organizer is built to accommodate both your photos and your video collection, making it easy to mix and match media in your creations.

Backing Up Your Pictures Online

Okay, so maybe you’re not the preventive maintenance type. You only clean house when company’s coming over, and you remember to get your car’s oil changed just barely often enough to keep it on the road. Even so, if you don’t do any of the other things suggested in this chapter to keep your photo collection safe and accessible, do this one thing: Back it up. As they say, there are two kinds of computer users in this world: those who’ve experienced a hard drive crash, and those who haven’t—yet. If your photos are important to you, take a few minutes to protect them by backing them up to an alternate location. Photoshop Elements makes that just about as easy for you as it could possibly be by enabling you to sync your photo catalog, in whole or in part, with a mirror of that catalog stored on Photoshop.com.

The first step in setting up an online backup is signing in to your Photoshop.com account, or creating one if you haven’t already done so. You can log in or create a new account from the Welcome screen, or by clicking Sign In or Create New Adobe ID in the menu bar. If you’re going to set up a backup anyway, though, you might as well just choose Preferences from the Organizer’s Edit menu and choose Backup/Synchronization from the submenu. The first thing you’ll see is a notification that you’re not logged in to your account and a Sign In button; click it to proceed.

In the Sign In window, either enter your email address and password and click Sign In or click Create New Adobe ID and follow the instructions to create a new account (see Figure 4.1). After you’re signed in, you’ll see the settings that determine what gets backed up to your online storage space at Photoshop.com and what doesn’t (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1. From here you can sign in or create a new account so that Photoshop Elements can access your backup space on Photoshop.com.

Figure 4.2. Using these settings, you can specify which albums are synced to Photoshop.com.

Deciding Which Photos to Back Up

The first decision to make when you’re setting up online backup is whether you want to back up your whole catalog or just certain albums. The Elements Backup/Synchronization Services window shows you how much of your 2GB allotment you’ve used and how much additional space will be taken up by the other selections you opt to back up. In Figure 4.2, the bright green area of the bar graph indicates space I’ve already used on the Photoshop.com server, the dull green area shows how much additional space my new selections will take up, and the empty area shows how much space I’ll have left over when I’m done with the next backup. Obviously, if you’re running out of space, you’ll want to consider either upgrading your membership to the Plus level, which gives you more storage space, or removing some of your selections from the “to sync” list and backing up only the most important parts of your collection.

In addition to space, however, another consideration for you may be time and bandwidth. If you have a slow Internet connection, you might not be willing or able to keep it open long enough to back up your entire photo catalog. In this case, you’ll want to choose the most important albums to back up and skip the rest. You may even want to create a special “Backup” album in which you can store those pictures that you really, really don’t want to lose.

To include an album or category of images (such as “Media not in any album”) in your backups, just click the check box in the Sync column next to that album or category’s name (see Figure 4.3). If you want to back up everything, just click Backup/Sync Entire Catalog to place a checkmark next to each entry.

Figure 4.3. If I’m running low on space—which I’m not, as you can see—I might opt to sync only my most important albums, the ones containing pictures of my kids and my best photos.

When it backs up your catalog, Photoshop Elements includes any alterations you’ve made to keyword tags, metadata, star ratings, and so on, as well as just the images themselves. It can back up not only photo files but also anything that you can store in the Organizer, such as video and audio files. Photos scheduled for syncing are marked in the Media Browser with an icon, which varies to indicate that the photo is awaiting backup (Pending), has been backed up (Completed), is excluded from backups due to its media type (Excluded for Sync), or is not a supported file for backup (Unsupported). Over in the Albums panel, Photoshop Elements changes album icons, adding a double arrow, to indicate ones that will be included in your backups. Yet another icon appears next to the name of each album while it’s actually being backed up.

If you want to watch a backup in progress, click the Photoshop.com Backup/Synchronization Agent icon in your Windows system tray and choose View Backup/Synchronization Status. This opens a window displaying the image currently being backed up, along with progress bars showing how far along the backup of that image is as well as how far along the total backup is (see Figure 4.4). You can also initiate a backup from this dialog by clicking Sync Now. You might want to do this if you’ve made some changes and are about to shut down your computer before an automated sync will occur (about every 10 minutes), to ensure that those changes are included in your Photoshop.com catalog.

Figure 4.4. This dialog enables you to monitor backups in real time.

Using Advanced Backup/Sync Options

For more control over what gets backed up when and how, click the triangle next to Advanced Backup Options to reveal additional settings. These are as follows (see Figure 4.5):

• New Albums Will Backup/Sync Automatically—When you create a new album, it automatically starts out set to synchronize automatically. If you don’t want this to happen—you prefer to pick and choose which albums get backed up by editing their individual settings—uncheck this option.

• When I Delete a File Online, Ask Before Deleting It from My Computer—This option also starts out turned on; it’s intended to make sure that you don’t accidentally lose files on your computer by deleting them from your catalog online. Turn it off if you’re confident that you’ll never make this slip of the mouse. Leave it on if you want to confirm deletions from your catalog that are being made to match your online catalog.

• Resolve Backup/Sync Conflicts Automatically—If you turn this option on by checking the box, Photoshop Elements automatically resolves any file conflicts while syncing. If you rarely have conflicts or aren’t that concerned about ending up with the wrong version of a picture, go ahead and turn this feature on. Otherwise, keep it turned off and resolve conflicts yourself when Photoshop Elements asks you about them.

• Restrict Backup/Sync to Files Smaller Than—When you’re really tight on space, you can choose to exclude large files from your backups by checking this box and specifying a file size beyond which your files will have to just take their chances.

• Synchronize File Types—Here you can specify which file types you want to synchronize. For example, you might not care about backing up video and audio files, if your primary use of the Organizer is just to manage your photo collection. To make sure that you don’t take up extra space in your Photoshop.com allotment with these files, uncheck the boxes for video and audio.

Figure 4.5. Advanced options enable you to fine-tune the backup/sync process.

You can also control backups using the commands in the Photoshop.com Backup/Synchronization Agent’s pop-up menu in your Windows system tray (see Figure 4.6). If you think that the backup is taking up too much of your Internet connection while you’re trying to watch a video online, for instance, you can choose Pause Backup/Synchronization to temporarily halt the sync. Or if you want to stop backing up entirely, choose Stop Backup/Synchronization in the pop-up menu. After you do this, the only way to turn automatic backups back on is to return to the Backup/Synchronization Preferences and click Backup/Sync Is On again. To make sure that backups never interfere with other things you’re doing on your computer, choose Backup/Sync Only When Idle so that backups happen only when the computer is completely idle (that is, when you’re not typing or doing something else).

Figure 4.6. Control backups as they’re happening with this pop-up menu.

Syncing Your Collection to Multiple Computers

Once your photos are synced to Photoshop.com, getting them synced up on another computer is as simple as logging in with your Adobe ID from Photoshop Elements on that computer and enabling backup/synchronization the same way you did for your first computer. Remember, to get started, just choose Backup/Synchronization from the Preferences submenu in the Organizer’s Edit menu. Here are a few situations in which you might find this capability useful:

• Work and home—Keep your photos synced and available to you whether you’re at home in your kitchen or at work or school sitting at your desk.

• Office and household—Synchronize your photo collection between your household and home office computers, or your desktop and laptop.

• Yours and hers—Got two or more adults in the family who both want access to the same photos? Whether they live in the same house or not, you can keep an entire photo catalog or just specified albums in sync.

• Kids’ and yours—Make sure you know what your kids are taking pictures of by syncing their photo collection with yours.

Working with Your Collection on Photoshop.com

So far in this chapter, you’ve learned how to use Photoshop.com as a safety net for your photo collection, one that makes sure you always have a current backup of it and enables you to share your catalog across multiple computers. But there’s more to it than that. With Photoshop.com, you have access to your photos anywhere, anytime, as long as you have a web connection. You can view your collection, add photos to it, delete images, change albums, edit caption data, and even edit photos by cropping them, cleaning them up, and modifying color and lighting.

Why don’t you take a look? If you’ve backed up all or part of your collection to Photoshop.com, start up a web browser (make sure it will accept cookies) and go to Photoshop.com. Log in using the same email address and password you used to create your Adobe ID. You’ll see your photos and albums laid out for you on a simple page that makes it easy for you to flip through them (see Figure 4.7).

Figure 4.7. Here’s what my photo catalog looks like on Photoshop.com (viewed on a Mac, even though I run Photoshop Elements on my PC).

Adding Pictures via Photoshop.com

To get your photos into your Photoshop.com catalog without going through Photoshop Elements, you must first either import them from your camera or phone into your computer’s hard drive or mount the camera’s removable media on your computer. Then, go to Photoshop.com and click Upload Photos & Video in the upper-left corner of the window. Browse to the photos’ folder (or to the photo file itself if you want to upload a single image) and click Select (see Figure 4.8). Then Photoshop.com uploads the image and adds it to your catalog. From here you can add the picture to an album, create a new album for it, or edit the picture using a set of tools similar to the ones in Photoshop Elements.

Figure 4.8. To upload, navigate to a folder, a single file, or a group of files and click Select. Photoshop.com does the rest.

Photoshop.com’s editor produces JPEG files as large as 2048 pixels square and up to 25MB in size, which means that if you upload other file types or larger images, they’ll be converted to those specs when you work on them in the editor. The original files that you uploaded are preserved, however, and can be GIF, PNG, PSD, TIFF, or any other format that Photoshop and Photoshop Elements support.

Editing Your Collection via Photoshop.com

After you’ve got your photos uploaded to Photoshop.com, the question becomes, what can you do with them? The answer: A surprising number of things. Photoshop.com works like an online mini-Organizer (see Figure 4.9), enabling you to search your collection, add tags and captions, edit the images directly, and of course, share your photos with others. Changes made to your images online are synced back to your collection in the Organizer, and any conflicts—meaning that you made changes to both the online version and the offline version of an image between syncs—are presented to you for resolution.

Figure 4.9. In full-screen mode, Photoshop.com looks more like Photoshop Elements itself than it does a website.

Across the top of the Photoshop.com window are four “places” you can go within the site: My Library, My Gallery, My Friends, and Notifications. These show you, respectively, your photo collection, your shared (public) albums, your friends’ shared albums, and news and notices from Adobe. For now, we’re only concerned with what you can do in My Library.

To start with, you’ll see a list of your albums on the left. Click one to view its contents, or click All Photos and Videos to view everything you’ve got stored on Photoshop.com (that’s what Figure 4.9 shows). Across the top of the browser area, a toolbar contains useful buttons:

• Refresh—Click here to add in any changes to your own collection or your friends’ stuff that have occurred since you arrived at Photoshop.com.

• Search My Library—This text entry field works just like the Search field in the Organizer. Enter a word or two and press Enter to search your collection. Searches include album names, descriptions, file names, and tags. Click the triangle next to the search field to exclude any of these items from the search.

• Show—These settings determine what information is displayed below each photo—name, ratings, date, tags, description, comments, and duration (for video), or any combination of those. You can also choose Media types from the submenu to hide photos or videos or show both.

• Sort By—Photos are displayed in the order you specify with this pop-up menu (Newest, Oldest, or by Rating).

• Thumbnail Size—Click one of these buttons (small, medium, and large) to change the size of the thumbnails you’re looking at.

• Grid View and Table View—Click one of these buttons to change the browser area’s layout. Table view shows more information about each image than Grid view does.

Across the bottom of the window is another toolbar that enables you to make changes to your images, as follows:

• The Create button is for setting up new albums and album categories.

• Edit and Decorate enable you to work directly with the image, modifying it and adding clip art decorations. Keep reading to learn more about these functions.

• E-mail, Link, and Publish are for emailing a picture, sending a URL to a picture, or sharing an album.

• Save, Print, and Delete, as you might expect, save your changes to the picture, print the picture, or delete it.

Click the button at the far right end of this toolbar to hide or show the Properties and Comments panels on the right of the screen.

Now we get to the fun stuff. To edit an image, click its thumbnail, and then click the Edit button. The picture opens up in an editing space with a list of edits you can make on the left (see Figure 4.10).

Figure 4.10. Editing functions are located in a column on the left side of the editing area, with a slider for thumbnail size in the upper-right corner.

Editing functions are divided into three categories, starting with Basic. These include cropping, rotating, and resizing, as well as Auto Correct (a single click fixes everything), Exposure, Red Eye, Touchup, and Saturation controls. Next comes the Adjustments category, which enables you to work with White Balance and Highlights and add a Fill Light. You can also Sharpen the image or make it Soft Focus. Finally, in the Advanced category, you have access to more creative adjustments: Pop Color, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch, and Distort, all of which mimic adjustments and filters you can apply in Photoshop Elements (see Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11. I liked this photo before applying the Sketch filter, but I like it even better now.

LET ME TRY IT

Editing Images Online

1. Click My Library at the top of the screen to show your photo collection. In the sidebar on the left, click the group of photos from which you want to choose.
2. Click a photo to edit and then click Options to display a menu of choices. Choose Edit Photo, right at the top of the menu (see Figure 4.12).
   

   Figure 4.12. The contextual menu enables you to perform almost any action on a photo starting in the Library view.

   

3. In the list of commands on the left, click Crop and Rotate. Click the Rotate Right or Rotate Left button as needed to orient the photo correctly. Then drag the corners of the cropping marquee to adjust the picture’s shape (see Figure 4.13).
   

   Figure 4.13. You can crop, rotate, and straighten your image with the Crop & Rotate command.

   

4. Click Exposure to adjust the picture’s lighting. Preview the exposure thumbnails by hovering the cursor over them, then click the one you want to apply to your photo.
5. Click Saturation and then click a thumbnail to intensify the picture’s color.
6. Click Sharpen and do the same to choose a sharpening level.
7. Click Finish to apply all of your changes—they aren’t locked in until this point—or click Cancel to return to your library without making any changes (see Figure 4.14).

Figure 4.14. When you click Finish, Photoshop.com applies all your changes and saves the new version of the photo in your library.

Probably the simplest change to make to your images, however, is to add caption info. Just click the words Add description under a thumbnail and start typing. In Grid view, only the first few words of a caption are visible, but you can see the whole thing by holding your mouse cursor over a thumbnail without clicking.

Putting Photos on Disc

Suppose you want to put some pictures on a CD to send to your mom, or to use as an extra backup. You might think you’d have to dig through your folders to find the actual files (and do you actually know the filenames you’re looking for) and burn them. But you’d be mistaken. Photoshop Elements can burn selected images to a disc directly from the Organizer.

LET ME TRY IT

Burning a Disc

You do, of course, need to have a CD or DVD burner for this to work. If you’re all set on that front, burning a disc of photos takes just a few clicks.

1. First, find the photos you want to burn in the Organizer. Feel free to create an album to stash them in while you’re looking through your collection.
2. When you’ve got all the pictures you want to include on the disc, select them all (press Ctrl+A or choose Select All from the Edit menu).
3. Choose Burn Data CD/DVD from the File menu (see Figure 4.15).
   

   Figure 4.15. When you choose the Burn command, Photoshop Elements includes only the selected images.

   

4. If you have more than one disc burner, choose the one you want to use in the Burn Data CD/DVD dialog (see Figure 4.16).
   

   Figure 4.16. Your choices in the Burn dialog are very limited.

   

5. Give the disc a name (up to 10 characters) and choose a write speed if you don’t want to use the default speed (which is the fastest your drive offers).
6. Click OK, and away you go.

Sharing the Organizer with Adobe Premiere Elements

If you have both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements installed, you’ll see your stored media collections for both programs in the Organizer. (That’s why the Media Browser changed its name; it used to be called the Photo Browser.) Here’s where the two programs intersect:

• Right-click a thumbnail and choose Edit with Premiere Elements to open that file in Premiere Elements.

• Drag and drop photos, video files, and audio clips from the Organizer to the Media panel in Premiere Elements.

• Choose a video-related option from the Create or Share tabs, such as Burn Video DVD/BluRay in the Share tab and Instant Movie in the Create tab.

• Open the Premiere Elements DVD menu templates (which are PSD files located in the Premiere Elements folder) and customize them in the Photoshop Elements Editor.

• Click Edit Videos in the Fix tab to open Premiere Elements.