By now, you’ve probably noticed that the Organizer is getting, well, full. Full of great photos, true, but still, the more photos you add, the more cluttered the Photo Browser gets and the harder it is to visually scan through and see what you have. One way to clean things up a bit is to group some of your photos into stacks.

A stack is a group of several shots of the same subject or any group of photos that you don’t always need to see all at once. You can condense these photos into a stack so that they take up the space of only one photo in the Organizer, and you can choose which photo appears on top of the stack so that you can instantly identify the group of photos at a glance.

To make a stack, first make sure you’re in the Organizer; then select the photos that you want to stack up together. Choose Edit, Stack, Stack Selected Photos (or press Ctrl+Alt+S) to form them into a stack. Photoshop Elements groups all the photos into one “slot” in the Photo Browser, with a special icon indicating that they’re a stack (see Figure 5.1). When you want to view the photos in the stack, click the triangle next to its thumbnail; click the triangle again to collapse the photos back into their stack when you’re finished with them.

Figure 5.1. You can identify stacks in the Photo Browser by their blue “stack” icon, as well as the lighter gray rectangle surrounding their thumbnail.

Stacks aren’t immutable; you can modify them in several ways:

If your photo catalog is large, you might want to have Photoshop Elements help you create stacks. Press Ctrl+A to select all the pictures in your catalog, and then choose Edit, Stack, Automatically Suggest Photo Stacks. The program thinks about it for a minute and presents you with a list of suggested stacks (see Figure 5.2). You can scroll through and edit the stacks by dragging and dropping photos that should be stacked together into groups; if you see a stack that you don’t want to keep, click the Remove Group button above it.

Figure 5.2. Photoshop Elements thinks that the three photos shown at the top of the window should probably be stacked, but it couldn’t find a match for the lower shot, taken in the Boston subway.

Albums in Photoshop Elements are similar to albums in the real world, except that you can make as many as you want for free, and they can hold as many photos as you want. You might create an album for a significant event in your life, such as a christening or a special vacation, or you might create one more like a scrapbook, based around a theme such as “Cool Dog Pictures” or “Sports.” Each of your pictures can be in as many albums as you like.

After you’ve created an album, you can flip through it, play a slideshow of its images, or use it to create a project that you can share with others, such as a printed book or a photo CD. To view an instant slideshow based on any album, click the album’s name in the Album palette and press Ctrl+A to select all the photos in it. Then right-click any of the photos and choose View Photos in Full Screen. Change any settings in the Full Screen View dialog box (see Figure 5.3), and then click OK to see your slideshow.

Figure 5.3. You can choose any background music you like, and you can set the slideshow to repeat until you stop it; this feature is great for birthday parties and anniversaries.

Working with Albums

To add a photo to an album, drag it from the Photo Browser onto the album’s listing in the Albums palette (or, for that matter, drag the album from the Albums palette onto the photo’s thumbnail). An orange album icon appears below the thumbnail. Conversely, if you want to delete a photo from an album, right-click the album icon next to the thumbnail and choose Remove from Album in the contextual menu.

When you’ve gotten the photos into the album, you can rearrange them in any order you want by dragging and dropping the thumbnails. This is called Album Order. You can switch between Album Order and a Date view by choosing an option from the Photo Browser Arrangement pop-up menu in the toolbar (see Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6. Sometimes you want to see everything in chronological order; sometimes you don’t.

You can change the name of an album by choosing the album in the Albums palette and clicking the Edit Album button. Then enter a new name and click OK.

Creating Smart Albums

Smart albums are ones that Photoshop Elements maintains for you. You set criteria, such as keywords, a date range, and star ratings. Any time a photo matching those criteria is added to or deleted from your catalog, the smart album automatically updates.

How well smart albums work depends on how much Photoshop Elements knows about your photos. The more keywords you assign, the more star ratings you apply, and the more albums you create, the better the Organizer can distinguish among your photos and pull out the ones that belong in a smart album. Of course, smart album criteria can also be based on the image data that every image has, including its file type, date, filename, size, and even notes that you can add yourself. To view image data, right-click a thumbnail in the Organizer and choose Show Properties to display the Properties palette (see Figure 5.7). Click each tab to view a different category of data: General, Metadata, Keyword Tags, and History. You can add more data, including notes and a caption for each image. You can include all this information in a smart album’s criteria.

Figure 5.7. Image data is divided into four categories in the Properties palette.

Did you Know?

When you scan images, their Date and Time data in the General tab of the Properties palette is based on when you made the scans. Photoshop Elements has no way of knowing when a printed photo was taken. This means that the image won’t be included correctly in any date-based searches. To fix the date, click the little calendar button to the left of the date and time to enter a new date and time for the image, based on your own knowledge of the event it portrays.

Create a Smart Album

Over time, you’ll need to update some albums, such as ones you create for kids. You’ll want to add new photos to these albums when you import them into your collection. If your album falls into this category, you can create a smart album so that the updates will happen automatically, behind the scenes.

1. Click the Create New Album button and choose New Smart Album (see Figure 5.8).

   

   Figure 5.8. Be sure to scroll through the entire menu of criteria; you might be surprised by the seemingly obscure data on which you can base a smart album.

2. Give the new album a descriptive name, such as “Little Joey Through the Years.”

   Did you Know?

   After you create a smart album, you can change its name the same way you change the name of a regular album, using the Albums palette’s Edit Album button.

3. Click the first pop-up menu in the Search Criteria area and choose Keyword Tags.

4. Click the third pop-up menu and choose one of the tags you created earlier. You’ll notice that the middle pop-up menu disappears and is replaced by “Include.” This allows the photos added to the album to have other tags besides the one you’re using as your album criterion.

5. To add another criterion, click the plus sign next to the third pop-up menu, and then fill in the new parameters you want to add (see Figure 5.9). This might be a date range, another tag, the photo’s orientation (vertical or horizontal), or even something as obscure as which camera took the photo.

   

   Figure 5.9. This smart album will contain all the pictures I took at Large Gazehound Racing Association events during 2007.

6. When you’re finished setting criteria, click OK to create the album.

Did you Know?

You can also create a new smart album by performing a search in the Photo Browser, clicking the Options button in the Find bar, and choosing Save Search Criteria As Smart Album. Use this technique to modify a smart album, too: With the album’s contents displayed, use the Find bar to make changes until the criteria suit you; then right-click the album’s name and choose Save Current Search to Album.

Applying keyword tags is probably the most effective way to make your photo collection searchable because the keywords can be anything that works for you. For example, in my family, we have a running visual joke involving a giraffe (it’s too long a story to tell here). So, if I’m inclined, I can create a “giraffe joke” keyword tag and apply it to any relevant photos so that I can find them any time I’m in need of a giggle. How far you take your keyword organization depends only on how much time you want to spend on it.

Applying keyword tags is a simple drag-and-drop process. Be aware that if you apply a tag to a stack, all the photos in the stack will be tagged. To apply tags to specific photos within a stack, expand the stack so you can see all the photos it contains, and apply tags to them individually. And don’t forget that you can add as many different tags to each photo as you like.

You can move on to create tags for places and events in your photo collection. You can even create your own categories and subcategories.

Putting Your Photos on the Map

In version 6, Photoshop Elements gives you one more way to identify photos: by their location. Select one or more photos in the Photo Browser, right-click, and choose Place on Map. Then enter an address so that Photoshop Elements can add a red pin to its map showing the location where these images were taken. You can put in a complete street address, a city and state, or just a state.

After you’ve placed a few photos on the map, take a look at it by choosing Display, Show Map (see Figure 5.12). Clicking any map pin shows you all the photos associated with that location. Now this is cool; the only way it could be better is if you could print your map. Maybe in the next version....

Figure 5.12. It’s easy to see where I’ve been lately, based on my Map.

Suppose you’re looking for a group photo that includes your favorite brother-in-law. You could look by date for photos of events you know he attended, but that’s old school. There’s got to be a better way. So perhaps you could search for the keyword tag devoted to him. Wait, you don’t have a keyword tag just for your brother-in-law? Shame on you!

Fortunately, Photoshop Elements can help you keep track of who’s in which pictures with a feature called face tagging. The software recognizes faces within a photo, highlights them, and asks you to apply a tag to each one. You can tag each batch of photos as you import them, or you can sit in front of the TV and tag a few whenever you have time. It’s up to you!

To get started with face tagging, choose Find, Find Faces for Tagging. If you don’t have any photos selected, Photoshop Elements asks you to confirm that you do actually want it to find faces in all the currently displayed photos; click Yes. Immediately, faces start popping up in the Face Tagging window, which conveniently also contains the Keyword Tags palette (see Figure 5.13). Now that you know how to create and apply keyword tags (you did read the previous section, didn’t you?), you can get started making the appropriate tags and tagging all those faces.

Figure 5.13. Some of the faces Photoshop Elements finds aren’t really faces, and others are passers by whom I don’t want to tag.

Or perhaps not quite all of them. Now, we all know computers aren’t really perfect. In this case, that translates to the fact that not everything Photoshop Elements thinks is a face really is a face. That’s no problem, though; all you have to do is skip over that image without applying a tag to it. If you want to make sure it doesn’t show up in future face-tagging sessions, you can right-click the thumbnail and choose Don’t Tag Selected Items; you’ll never be bothered with that bogus face again. Future face-tagging sessions also won’t include any faces you’ve already tagged.

As if all this weren’t enough, Photoshop Elements provides yet one more way to organize your pictures: according to how much you like them. You can assign each photo a rating of up to five stars simply by clicking the gray stars in the Organizer under the photo’s thumbnail. You’ll notice that as you move your mouse over the gray stars, gold ones pop up in their place. Click when you see the number of gold stars you want to apply to the image (see Figure 5.14).

Figure 5.14. Now this is a five-star photo if I ever saw one.

Having rated your photos, you can display high-rated or low-rated photos in the Photo Browser by clicking the gray stars in the Find bar in the same way and then choosing an option from the pop-up menu: And Higher, And Lower, or Only. You can use these criteria to make a Smart Album, too. Of course, you can always remove a rating by clicking the gold star farthest to the right.

Having a lot of fabulous photos won’t do you much good if you can’t find the ones you want when you need them. That’s why Photoshop Elements includes the Organizer alongside the Editor. In the Organizer, you’ll find several ways to identify images to help you keep them organized. You can group similar shots into stacks, and you can create regular albums as well as smart albums that update without your having to lift a finger. Taking the time to apply keywords to photos makes it possible to search for exactly the images you have in mind when you want to work with them. Photoshop Elements’ automatic face-tagging feature makes it easier to locate people you might want to tag in your photos. And if you apply star ratings to your photos, you can even find the ones you like best—and least—and make that part of the criteria for smart albums.

These next questions test your understanding of all the organizational techniques we’ve discussed in this hour. Even if you’re not really the organized type, go ahead and try one of the activities after the quiz; you might find that you like being organized!