Photoshop Elements for Image Management
About two years ago I had an opportunity to purchase Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 at a huge 50% discounted price at Best Buy. I have been using the software package ever since for my digital scrapbooking projects. This has since been upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Elements 6
Recently I began to think about using the same software to catalog my digital images. This is something that the application attempts to do automatically every time you save an image within the editing portion of the program. I have always chosen not to save to the catalog because I had not taken the time to understand how the PSE catalog worked.
Now I comprehend that the program is simply creating a database that basically tells it:
- where the image is located on the computer drive and
- any identifying tags associated with that particular image.
I had always been under the assumption that PSE was going to somehow rearrange my images into obscure file folders that I would be unable to navigate on my own if I chose to at some point or, worse, make copies of the images and store the copies in obscure folders thus using additional space on my hard dive. This is simply not the case. Now, I like building my own databases but I’m getting a bit lazy or rather too busy to bother anymore so I decided to let PSE try to impress me.
My next concern was that PSE would try to index every last one of my images without asking me if that was what I wanted. Picasa, Google’s free counterpart, did this and while the result was not bad, I just like having more control over what my computer is doing and I wanted the ability to ease into this new project. Okay, I’m a control freak and I don’t like applications that try to do everything for me including “think”.
So I gave Photoshop Elements instructions to search certain folders on my hard drive for image files. It brought up about 47 images within the given criteria, none of which had been tagged or described in any form or fashion other than an appropriate filename.
Now I admit that I had done a quick search on Google for a short tutorial on how to tag images in PSE. You simply go to the panel on the right side of the screen and under “Organize”, click on “Tags” then “New” and create your new tags within a category such as “People”. I started with “Genealogy” and some tags for certain surnames that I knew were pertinent to my images. Little icons appear next to the tag titles. Normally I dislike icons but these are kind of cute and easy to drag and drop onto the thumbnail image which is in the PSE workspace. I used the genealogy tag on the appropriate images and the surname tags as needed. Now that I think about it, I really should have used the word “ancestor” instead of “genealogy”. Oh well.
Then I was able to do a search within the catalog for “genealogy” and sure enough, only the images tagged as such were retrieved.
You couldn’t ask for an easier or more efficient way to manage your digital images. In fact, I was able to organize and tag about 47 images in a matter of minutes once I took a few minutes to familiarize myself with the program. And I believe that means I have completed the fourth requirement in event number 3. Organize Your Research! in the Genea_Blogger Games being held among the Facebook Genea-Blogger Group members.
