Lessons

Lesson Info

The Elements Organizer

We're gonna start at the very most beginning which is in the organizer. So as I mentioned, the way that this works is with the catalog system much like we have at the library. So what you get when you first open the software, you open the organizer part of it is your looking at your catalog. Now my catalog here is blank because I wanted to start with a blank catalog to show you how it works. So the first thing that we're gonna do is import images into the catalog so that we have something to work with. So I'm gonna go up to the import button which is right up here in the top left corner and I'll click and I can choose to import from a number of different sources. I'm gonna choose from files and folders. So I have prepared some images here that we can use to bring in. So if I navigate here, I've got all these different folders of things so I've got some random images, some travel images and of course the course files. So I'm going to select these three folders. I'm holding down the comm...

and key or the control key to be able to select multiple folders at once and then I single click on them and I'm gonna choose get media. It's important I think, to just point out sometimes people get a little tempted to put automatically fix red eye or automatically suggest photo stacks. Those can be great options but, they do take quite a bit of time and I know I don't have a lot of red eye and I don't have a lot of things that would make sense to stack and we can talk about what that means. So I'm gonna leave those off. But I'll go ahead and just click get media. And I wanna include sub folders if I had any, I'd wanna include those as well. So we'll just go ahead and click that. And it's importing 118 items. And really quickly, it just generated this. Now, I wanna point out something that's really important that can be a little bit confusing if you are totally new to how digital imaging works and sort of the idea behind the software and how it manages all of this. Which is that these images do not live in the software. In other words, just now when we clicked import, we did not copy these files on to into, I should say, the organizer. They are on my hard drive where they've always been. I did not make a duplicate. We did not move them. All we did was tell Elements that those files exist. We said hey Elements, look over here, we have this huge box of books. So if this were a real library, it's like someone just came and we have all these books. They donated books to the library so the library is now keeping track of them. That's how this works. So they're still in their same location. So I just wanna say that that means if we if you ever deleted the software for some reason, it's not gonna take your photos of with it. The photos are still safe and sound on your hard drive right where you left them and hopefully backed up somewhere too. Okay so let's talk about what we can do to find our images in here already. We haven't even done anything but we are viewing our thumbnails. We've just imported them. So we're looking at our media, okay? At the top of the screen here and we have these different workspaces, I should say. Okay so we have something called eLive. This is sort of like a dynamic home page for Adobe and for Elements where they change like tutorials and articles here so that can be fun to peruse at your leisure but the media is where it's sort of our home base, okay? With the media selected, I can scroll through and see all my images. I've not filtered anything here and not selected anything. So ideally when you're working with Elements and the organizer, this becomes like your entire photo collection. So in a perfect world, you would just import your images onto your hard drive but also have elements acknowledge them at the same time so when you download your images, you would just do that with Elements. And you can do that by just getting by choosing file, get photos and video. Same like we did here and then you would just navigate to your camera card and move them to your hard drive and acknowledge them in Elements at the same time. So eventually they will all end up here. And we can talk about how they're organized. One way is with the timeline. This is my favorite way because it's very straight forward and it's already done. The way we view it is we come up to the view menu and put a check mark here, click to select timeline. If I click again while it's on the screen, it goes away. So to get it back, again, view timeline and let's take a peek at what we have here. We see some dates. So some of these photos are rather old. Some of these are from my archive, some of these are stock. It's kind of a mix of things. They span a lot of dates, a lot of years. But we can see like 2011 has a lot. So these are images from a trip I took to Morocco and because there's a lot of images here this stack is tall so visually I can even see that there's a lot of images from this time frame. Versus like whatever this is random just this picture not a lot okay. And there's a bunch more if I click over here. So you can see right away that I can jump to different collections of images by simply clicking these tabs here. You can also filter your images based on this timeline by dragging these bookends in. So if you only wanna see images taken from about 2015 or 14 whatever this is to let's say here, you can drag these little filter ends these book ends in, and now it's showing me a filtered amount of all my photos. So I'm only seeing this section of my time range. To clear that we just click all media. Just kidding. (laughs) We can just drag those book ends back out to clear that. Okay so that is a look at the time line. Another thing I wanna show you is the faces and people and how this works. So moving on from our sort of home base of our just full catalog of our media, we can click over here to select people and you'll notice that it says there's no people and it's telling us we should import some media. And I feel like this is a little misleading because we know there's people and I know that Elements knows that there's people. But for whatever reason, we're not seeing them by default because there's a check mark over here that says hide small stacks. So a stack is just a virtual grouping of multiple images that for one reason or another we think or Elements thinks they should be grouped. So if you think of like physical photos, if you had a bunch that were all like from one roll of film in your camera, you might put them together in a stack and they're sort of a group. So what we are telling Elements with this check mark on is to hide a small groups of pictures of people. But in this case, maybe that's all we have of pictures of people. So I'm gonna uncheck hide small stacks and oh well look at this. These are the different people that its finding in these photos and some of it's amazing. I mean some of its like its seeing people in toast or whatever this thing is. (laughs) That always cracks me up, things that it thinks are a face. Sometimes it will see faces in you know a painting or something that's on the background in a photo. So that's kind of fun. That's why the hide stack option, hide small stacks option exists is because if there is like a lot of instances of random faces that it's not seeing more than once, it assumes that it's background noise and not actual faces that are meaningful to you. Part of your life. So it hides them. But for example, this is my son. I'd say he's pretty meaningful in my life (laughs). He's in more than two photos here but it's only recognizing him in two. So I'm gonna show you how we can fix that. But we can name him by clicking right here. And his name is Ze So I'm gonna type in his name right here. You'll notice it's popping up and it can even add from my Facebook friend's list if I wanted it too. But i think I'm good with just him for right now. So I'm gonna add him and now it looks like he just disappeared. Well, I'm looking at unnamed people. So this is my list of unnamed faces that are in here. I also have a nephew over here. So we'll type in his name, Coal. And now he disappears 'cause he went over to the name section. So these are all other just kind of random stuff that I'm not gonna name. So we'll leave them in unnamed. We can also click over to named and now we see Coal is here and Ze is right here. And we have two pictures of Ze, one picture of Coal. If I click on this, it will pop open and show me here is the two photos. And if one of them wasn't Ze, I could delete it by clicking right there. Okay, let's go back to our media collection because we also have more pictures of Ze than what it automatically recognized. Because it's looking for faces, right? And if you take a lot of pictures of people and you are really into sort of a photo journalistic approach you might have a lot of pictures where people are not looking at the camera. So Elements is gonna not necessarily be able to recognize that there's people in that shot. So all of these ones where he's looking down or looking sideways, it's not knowing that it's him. So what I'm gonna do is just click right here to select this photo, scroll down a little bit. Shift click right here to select this photo. Whoops. We can also adjust the zoom with the slider down here. So I think that might be helpful. So let's click this one and shift click over here. There we go. So shift clicking lets us click a whole series so click on the first one, shift click on the last one and it will select a series of images. And then I can tag them with Ze's tag by coming over here and if you don't have it open already, we got Ze right here when we labeled his face, Elements created this tag. So I'm gonna click and drag it and drop it on any one of the selected photos. And now, it tagged it. And I see the icon temporarily and then it disappears. But I can filter my images now. If I wanna scroll through here and be like, I just wanna look at my Ze pictures. I just, all I have to do to do a search for Ze is come over here and click in this box to the left of his tag and it's instant. It just instantly shows me. I don't even have to wait for it to load. It just instantly shows me everything with his tag. And I love that feature. Partly that is happening because the images are not in the organizer. The organizer is working with proxies. So all these little thumbnails that we see. They are just proxy stand-ins for the actual full file that's on our hard drive. So it makes it really fast to be able to label things and filter things and look for all kinds of stuff. To clear the search, we can either click right back here. This left arrow to go back to all media, excuse me. There we go or you can just click to remove the little binoculars. So that's what this icon is. It's like your on a safari for a search for your images. So, there's little binoculars here. So you can toggle that on and off to turn on or off your search. Okay, we can also group things. We have a family group here that we could drag Ze into this family and Coal is also, he's my nephew so, whoops. I can click and drag to put his tag under family. And then if I wanted to search and see pictures of all my family, I can click to the left of family. And that would include all of the nested tags within it. So there would be my nephew and my son. And that's pretty awesome and Elements makes that really painless. Another thing I'll show you quickly is the places and how this works. So a lot of these are not geo tagged. So for example, if we scroll over to Morocco, nothing is showing up. But if we scroll over here, we can see some other random stuff that's popping up from different locations. If I hover over it, I, oops, I can actually move it. Whoops there we go. You can see what that's about. You can click to scroll through and see what the images are. You can click on it and then you can get in and see what those, those images are filtered here. But what else we can do is we can actually add locations to things. So if I scroll actually, let's get back to our media here and scroll to, here's the Morocco pictures. So let's say for example, I just wanna tag some of these as Morocco. So I would click and we'll just say it's these ones. Click and shift click to get these all selected. And then down here at the bottom, I can click add location. And I could type Morocco and... It's gonna be like, is this the Morocco you mean? Yes. And then it geo tags them and puts them over here. So I don't even have to like find the exact location myself. I just say hey, it was Morocco. And it'll all be over here. So that's another way that makes it easy to find stuff. And it will show up when we go back to media. It all shows up right here under the places tags. So now, when I wanna search, I just hit that next to Morocco and now we see the Morocco photos. And lastly up here, we have events. So this is sort of guessing based on dates and times that photos were taking, it's sort of grouping them. So because my representation of images here is kind of isolated, I have like pockets of some photos and it's not my actual whole hard drive of images so they're kind of sparse and spread out. So it's not really a good representation of events. But it's trying. And I can help it out a little bit by dragging to have less, fewer events I should say, which means it's expanding its definition of event. Or if I want more events, I can drag this up and then it basically is organizing them you know, more by date. So for example, here is an event. This was a cross country bicycle ride that my husband and I did, and it's grouped them here by their dates. And it just sort of knows like these images belong together. And it's absolutely correct. So I can add an event by clicking right here and typing bike trip. And I'll say okay. And now it has applied that event to all of those images. You can also search for events and for images by year and month. So this'll also pull just by your date and time stamp in the file so you don't even have to do anything to really find your images based on date or time. Let's go back to our media collection and now we see that a bike trip event tag has been added. So if I'm like, oh I wanna see my bike trip pictures, it's been a while. I can click and relive those fond memories of climbing up mountains from starting at sea level. It was a good time. And I can relive that any chance I want by clicking the little icon right here. In addition to these workspaces, we have a create workspace right here. So let's say I wanna take these bike pictures and turn them into a slide show. I can click the create tab. Or button I guess and just click slide show. And, we'll wait here. Hopefully it's not too many images. And it's calling it memories, we can tweak all of this stuff. But it's taking those photos and it's just automatically applying transitions. We can add music to it. It even has sample music tracks that come with it that we can apply and then it's just gonna play. It's adding some panning and zooming and you know, that's not bad for about 10 seconds of work. So then we could export this if we want to. We could send our slideshow any number of other places or export it to our disk somewhere. To save the project itself to be able to come back and work on it later, we would just save it to our organizer by clicking save and calling it bike show. And that's it and we can click back, oops. And go back to our all media and here's where that would then live. Here's our bike show so if we wanna edit it, we can just double click here and and add more photos or change the settings as we want to. Another thing we can do, we have keywords over here. All of these things, they have different titles like keywords, people tags, places tags, event tags. But they're all just really tags. I mean, that's just what they are. So they're sort of categorized this way but just think of them all the same way like tags. So keywords are also tags but they're not people necessarily. They might not be places although they also could be. And they might, may or may not be events. So they're kind of an overlap and you can, maybe you don't use places or events very much. Maybe you just make everything a keyword. Up to you. But let's see for example that I wanna have a keyword about I don't know photos with clouds perhaps. That might fall under a nature category. We can click under keywords, if we click this little green plus sign, we can add either a new tag or we can add a subcategory or category. I'm not gonna get that into this in our short little intro class today. But you can get as type A as you want to. You can have all kinds of sub categories and sub sub categories. You can just go to town on that. I'm just going to make a keyword tag because it's easy. So it's quick. They're all easy but, we're not gonna get into the nested stuff. So we'll just make a new keyword tag. And it's gonna be in the category of nature. So in a sense, it's already nested. And I'll just call it clouds. And I'm gonna edit the icon later. And I'll click okay. And then I'm gonna scroll through my media collection here on any image that's got clouds. So I'm gonna hold down command or control on my keyboard. There's clouds here. Any image I guess that has clouds that I care to find later. So maybe not that one. I don't remember if that's ocean or clouds. I think its clouds. Ah, let's see. There's some cool clouds here. These are definitely cool clouds. We'll just say that's good. So I have a small number of clouds selected. Cloud images and then we're just gonna take this keyword and drag it onto any one of them and let go. And now those images are labeled with clouds. And if I click, I can see them all instantly. If I realize that I labeled something wrong. So if we go back to all media and maybe, maybe I accidentally somehow tagged her with a cloud. That would be weird so if I tag this and then I'm like, whoa wait, there's no clouds in this photo. If I select the photo and right click or control click, I can go in here and say remove keyword tag, clouds. And now it's removed. So it's really easy to fix if you make a mistake. Pretty nice. Alright. So that's kind of the overview. You can zoom to change your workspace and whatever it is that your doing just know you can always get back to your media by clicking up here or if you're running a search or something, you just can go back and click all media. So this is sort of what I would call our home base and we work from here. We also, I like to have my folder panel open. So this shows me where these images are on my hard drive. So it's another way, if you are a folder person like I am, I tend to put every new download I make a folder for. It's usually by date. But when I'm teaching classes and things, I make folders for different projects or in this case groups of images. So the folders come here and this is just another way that I can click and organize and separate my files. So that can be handy as well.