Tag you’re it
With Photoshop Elements we are given a very powerful tools for handling images and making it handy for keeping our lives in order. Some a automatic and some do require just a little effort from us. Let’s talk about the automatic ones first.
Tagging our images
Elements tend to handle images differently than just a normal file viewing program. While the Organizer does allow us to see all the images on our drives if we don’t something to keep them in order then it just becomes a huge shoebox of pictures that we have to view every time we want to do something. Here is an easy way to start to clean up the mess. It is called Tagging. Tagging is nothing more than attaching words like vacation spots, people and pet’s name, locations, and the like to images so when you want to find just those images you just click on the tags and those images pop up. It is not hard to create tags or to tag images.
From Organizer you go the Keyword Tag Pallet. Normally it is on the right hand side with some pre set colorful tags there. You can start to use these preset right away since they are generic titles like People, Place, Events and even the most useful one Other. A good place to start is with People since most of the images will be family and friends. Here you can add names of your family. Pick the category you want to add to like family, click on the Plus Sign at the top of the pallets and just add a name then click OK. Click and drag the tag to any image with that person in it and it is done. Now when you click in the box next to the tag all images that you have tagged will come up. Selection can be made even easier by getting groups of this person selected by Ctrl or Command Clicking or selecting the first image in a group then holding down the shift key click on the last image in a group. All the images in between will be selected. Then with you click and drag the tag all the images will be tagged. This same trick works for vacation images or shots taken at a birthday party. The more tags you have the better your search will be. You can even put more than one tag on an image so that if there is a group of people you can tag each one so later you can find the images with that person in it.
This will work for landscapes or location photos too. Set up a category for your landscapes then place tags under it for Mountains, Plains, Beach, Snow, Desert, Flowers or what ever and tag the images. That way if you are looking for your shots of Snowy Mountain tops you can click on Mountains and Snow and just those images will come up.
One Bonus Tip, since Photoshop Organizer works as a Catalog Viewer (more on that later) when you create tags they only live inside of Photoshop Organizer. One good thing to do every once and while to embed them into the megadata for each image. This command is found in File/Write Tags into Megadata. Then your tags are now in the keywords of the megadata which is always with any image file. Then if something should happen to your Photoshop Elements or you update then the keywords are always there.