3. Finding the Pictures You Want

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop Elements search tools to locate any picture in your collection within seconds.

If you’re willing to put in a little time up front adding data about your pictures in the Organizer, you’ll find that locating exactly the image you need later on is much, much easier. Organizer enables you to search for pictures based on several different kinds of information:

• Image attributes—File size, color mode, date, caption, camera used, and even more technical specifications such as whether the flash went off or what lens aperture was used.

• Visual similarity—Based on the colors and shapes that make up an image, Photoshop Elements can locate other images that may be similar to it. Sometimes this works very well, enabling you to find all the pictures that contain lots of sky or green trees; other times, you’ll find Photoshop Elements isn’t quite as smart as it thinks it is. But it’s usually worth a try if you’re trying to get your photos organized.

• Tags—Finding all the pictures that use a particular tag is easy; just click the tag’s name in the Keyword Tags panel. You can also use tags in combination with other information to narrow your search results further. For example, you can search for all the photos tagged “Birthday” that contain a person labeled “Dad” and were taken during the year 2009. That search might show you far fewer images than simply clicking the Birthday tag, which could save you a lot of time sifting through pictures.

• Ratings—The number of stars you assign to each photo is nominally intended to represent your opinion of that picture’s quality—or, really, how much you like it—but you can use star ratings as a one-to-five-point scale for any attribute you like, such as how appropriate pictures might be for a special project like a newsletter or calendar. Regardless of what the stars in your photo catalog signify, locating images with a particular minimum star rating is very easy. Like the other image data described here, star ratings can be combined with other criteria such as tags and dates to narrow down search results and enable you to pinpoint the images you seek.

If you find yourself performing the same search multiple times, you can take advantage of the ability to save search criteria as a smart album in Photoshop Elements. Essentially, a smart album tells the Organizer to perform the same search on the current set of photos each time you access it, so you don’t have to spend time entering the search criteria again.

Searching by Attributes

Along with the actual image data, every image file in your collection contains a selection of data about the picture, otherwise known as metadata. This information can be as simple as the file’s size and the date it was created—data that’s associated with every computer file—and as technical as the shutter speed of the camera that was used to create the photo or the GPS coordinates of the location where it was taken. How much metadata your images contain depends partly on the camera you use—more expensive cameras tend to store more metadata—and partly on how much information you’re willing and able to add yourself when you import photos into your catalog.

Searching by Date

The one piece of metadata you can be sure every photo file contains is a date. For images imported directly from the camera into Photoshop Elements and for most other images, that’s going to be the date the photo was taken. Occasionally, when an image is manipulated in another program or downloaded from the Web, it loses its original date and you’ll have only the date the photo was downloaded or when it was last manipulated. Most of the time, however, searching by date is the quickest way to find a particular photo, assuming you know when it was taken.

LET ME TRY IT

Search by Date

To make finding photos by date easy, the Photoshop Elements Organizer contains a Timeline that lists all your images in date order. You can zoom in on various parts of the Timeline to see the photos that were taken during that period.

1. If you don’t see the Timeline, choose Timeline from the Window menu to display it, or press Ctrl-L (see Figure 3.1).
   

   Figure 3.1. The Window menu enables you to hide the Timeline when you don’t need it by choosing Timeline again.

   

2. In the Display pop-up menu next to the menu bar’s Undo and Redo buttons, choose an option for the way the photos you find appear in the Media Browser.
   

   • Thumbnail view is what you’re used to seeing—variable-sized thumbnails of the photos, each accompanied by basic information about that photo such as its date, keyword tags, and star rating.

   Remember, you can drag the thumbnail-size slider at the top of the Media Browser to increase the number of photos you can see simultaneously.

   • Import Batch shows the batches of photos that you’ve imported, along with how the files were imported (see Figure 3.2).

   Figure 3.2. Import Batch view isn’t something you’d use every day, but it comes in handy when you’re looking for photos taken at the same time.

   

   • Folder Location groups the images by the folders in which they’re stored.

3. In the Timeline, which looks like a column graph (see Figure 3.3), click a column or drag the sliding date marker to a column to see the photos contained in that time period.
   

   Figure 3.3. The height of each column indicates how many photos in your collection were taken at the given time.

   

4. Narrow the range of time you’re looking at by dragging the end markers inward. Or display another time period on the timeline by clicking one of the arrows at its ends.

Searching Caption Data

Part of the metadata each image file contains can be a caption or a note (or both). This is where you put information such as who’s in the photo, where it was taken, what the occasion was, and anything else you want to remember about it. After you’ve added this information, you can search for captions or notes in your collection using the Caption or Note command.

To give a photo its own caption, right-click its thumbnail and choose Add Caption. (Even if there’s already a caption, the command doesn’t change.) Type in your caption info, and then click OK (see Figure 3.4). You can also select multiple photos, right-click, and choose Add Caption to Selected Items. In this case, the Add Caption dialog also contains a check box labeled Replace Existing Captions; check this box to make sure that the Organizer uses your new caption rather than any previously applied captions.

Figure 3.4. Captions can be as short or as long as you need them to be.

If you want to search for a caption, either one you’ve entered or one that already existed when you imported the photo, choose By Caption or Note from the menu bar’s Find menu. Enter your text, and then choose an option: Match Only the Beginning of Words in Captions and Notes to find captions whose beginning letter match what you enter, or Match Any Part of Any Word in Captions and Notes to find captions containing any part of the text you enter (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5. This search will find the word lantern within any caption, no matter where that sequence of letters appears in the caption.

Captions also appear in the Properties panel (see Figure 3.6); choose Properties from the Window menu or press Alt-Enter to show it. Click the General button at the top of the panel to see the caption for a selected image, and click in the field to add a caption or edit an existing caption.

Figure 3.6. If you’re doing a lot of work with captions or other properties, you can dock the caption panel to the panel well by clicking the double arrow next to its close box.

Searching for Other Metadata

When you want to search on multiple criteria at the same time, or if you want to search for metadata criteria that don’t overlap with the General properties (such as camera make), choose By Details (Metadata) from the Find menu (see Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.7. The Find menu offers a multitude of options for searching.

LET ME TRY IT

Searching by Metadata

1. In the Find by Details (Metadata) dialog, choose the kind of metadata you want to search for from the first pop-up menu.
2. In the second pop-up menu, if needed, set up a range for the search by choosing Starts With, Is Greater Than, or Contains. Some metadata types don’t need this second pop-up menu.
3. In the third pop-up menu, type or choose the data that you want to find. See Figure 3.8 for an idea of what the dialog looks like at this point.
   

   Figure 3.8. These conditions must all be met for an image to appear in the search results.

   

   If you want to include more criteria in your search, click the + button to the right of the third pop-up menu to add another pop-up menu. You can have up to 10 criteria per search.

4. If you want to add other search criteria, click the Add button to the right of the third pop-up menu and follow steps 1 through 3 to set up the new criteria.
5. Click the radio button labeled Any One of the Following Search Criteria [OR] or the one labeled All of the Following Search Criteria [AND] to determine whether the found items must meet all your requirements or just any one of them.
6. To remove a criterion from your search, click the Remove button to the right of the third pop-up menu for that criterion.
7. Click Search.
8. To change the search criteria after the search is completed, click Options in the Find bar at the top of the Media Browser and choose Modify Search Criteria from the pop-up menu (see Figure 3.9). Make your changes and click OK to perform the search with the new criteria.

Figure 3.9. To change the search without starting from scratch, use the Modify Search Criteria command.

Looking for Visually Similar Images

One way to think of visual search is as the lazy photographer’s cataloging method, because it operates solely on the basis of the image data, without regard to how much or how little other information you’ve supplied about the photos. To perform a visual search, you choose one or more photos, and then Photoshop Elements automatically finds images with similar colors, shapes, or overall layouts (see Figure 3.10). The search results are ranked by percentage of similarity to the original picture or pictures, with the closest matches showing up first in the list. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve tagged the photos or whether they were taken at the same time; for this trick, Photoshop Elements simply looks at the actual image content.

Figure 3.10. Here Photoshop Elements has found pictures containing the same shades of green that also show splotches of red or pink to one side, like the source image.

To perform a visual search, start in the Media Browser and do one of the following:

• Drag one or as many as four images to the Find bar.

• Select up to four images and choose By Visual Similarity with Selected Photo(s) and Video(s) from the Find menu in the menu bar.

Photoshop Elements hides any photos that don’t even come close to matching your source image or images and ranks the remaining images by how close they come to matching. For example, when I perform a visual search based on a photo of my dog Brazen lying on the floor (the first thumbnail in the search results), the most similar image is a picture of Brazen once again lying on that same floor, but taken more than a year after the source photo (see Figure 3.11). Other results include “nature” photos with mottled brown coloring similar to Brazen’s brindle coat.

Figure 3.11. These search results match the original photo’s colors and also its strong horizontal layout.

To clear the search results and go back to viewing your entire collection, just click Show All in the Find bar.

Searching with Tags

The Organizer provides you with a simple way to do a basic search based on a keyword tag: Click the square next to the tag’s name in the Keyword Tags panel. This shows all the photos to which you’ve assigned that tag and hides any photos that don’t use the tag. You can perform more sophisticated searches, however, by looking for photos with a particular combination of tags, or even looking for photos that don’t use a specified tag.

To add more tags to a search, drag as many tags as you like to the Find bar (see Figure 3.12), and to remove a tag from the search, double-click it in the Find bar. You can specify the level of precision you want Photoshop Elements to use in determining your search results. Click the Options menu in the Find bar and choose Show Best Matches, to show only images tagged with all the specified tags and Show Close Matches, to include photos that are tagged with some of the specified tags. If the Organizer can’t find any photos at all that have all the specified tags, it shows you the images that have as many of them as possible.

Figure 3.12. Thumbnails marked with a check indicate photos that match at least some of the search tags.

Excluding tags from a search shows you only images that don’t use those tags. You can use exclusion in combination with regular searches to find very specific sets of images—assuming you’ve made the most of your ability to tag photos. For example, you could search for all the photos of you that don’t contain your ex. To exclude a tag from a search, right-click that tag in the Keyword Tags panel and choose Exclude Photos With [tag, category, or subcategory name] from Search Results in the contextual menu. Or, to exclude multiple tags, choose Show Results That Do Not Match from the Options menu in the Find bar to display only photos that don’t use any of the tags you’ve specified.

Of course, you can also search for all the images that don’t have any tags by choosing Find Untagged Items (Ctrl+Shift+Q) from the Find menu in the menu bar. After you’ve found all the untagged pictures, you can add tags to them as needed. When you’ve finished with your search and want to view all the images in your catalog, click Show All in the Find bar.

Searching by Ratings

As you learned in Chapter 2, the simplest way to search for photos with a minimum star rating is to click the appropriate number of stars at the top of the Media Browser. Doing this hides any photos with fewer stars than you’ve specified, showing only those with at least that many stars (see Figure 3.13). If you want to get more specific, however, and show only the photos that have exactly the number of stars you indicate, you’ll need to choose one of the self-explanatory options from the ranking menu next to the stars: And Higher, And Lower, or Only.

Figure 3.13. You can search for images with fewer stars as well as those with more stars.

Creating Smart Albums from Searches

After you’ve put together a set of search criteria, you can turn those criteria into a smart album so that you can recreate the search any time you want. Remember, smart albums constantly update themselves as you add, remove, and modify images in your catalog, so you might get different results each time you rerun the search by viewing the smart album’s contents.

LET ME TRY IT

Creating Smart Albums

You can turn any set of search criteria into a smart album, no matter how complex. Before you save the search, though, make sure you look over the search results to confirm that you got what you expected from the search criteria. Here’s how to save a search as a smart album:

1. Perform any kind of search—find the pictures you want by tags, visual similarity, text terms, star ratings, or any combination of these. Check the results to confirm that your search terms are correct.
2. Click the Add button at the top of the Albums panel and choose Save Search Criteria as Smart Album.
3. In the Create Smart Album dialog, check the search the criteria in place and assign a name to the new smart album (see Figure 3.14).

Figure 3.14. The dialog shows what search criteria you used to find this group of images, giving you a chance to double-check before saving.

If you know ahead of time that you’ll want to turn a search into a smart album, you can indicate that right in the Find dialog. Choose Find by Details (Metadata) from the menu bar’s Find menu, and then check the box labeled Save This Search Criteria as Smart Album in the dialog after setting up your search criteria (see Figure 3.15). Don’t forget to give the new smart album a name that will be meaningful to you in the future.

Figure 3.15. When in doubt, save a search. Deleting it later will take less time than recreating it would.