Software: Photoshop Elements
Skills: Start managing your photo collection with Elements’s Albums and Keyword Tags
Time: 10 mins
If you are like me, the act of trying to find the best images to work on in my ever-growing picture library becomes more and more difficult. What’s the answer to locating those hero shots quickly?
Photoshop Elements has two key features designed to bring order to your photos – Keyword Tags and Albums. Keyword Tags are simple, often single-word descriptors, that can be added to your photos and used to help organise your images. The Keyword Tags panel stores the tags, and provides an easy drag and drop approach to adding tags to selected photos. The panel is grouped together with the Albums and Properties panels in the new Task pane and was previously called the Organize Bin.
Photoshop Elements also uses Albums (previously called Collections) as a way to organise your photos. Albums allows you to allocate the same image to several different groups. Unlike in the old days with simple folders-based systems, this doesn’t mean the file is duplicated and stored multiple times in different folders; instead, the picture is only stored or saved once and a series of Album associations indicates its membership in different groups.
Elements’ Smart Albums
A new Elements 6 feature, images are included in a Smart Album based on search criteria established at the time the album is created. When the Smart Album entry is selected, Elements adds any new photos that meet the search criteria to the group.