How to Import Photos into Adobe Photoshop Elements 15

During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will demonstrate importing images from a camera or card reader and discuss the download options and autoplay settings that can be modified. We also will look at the available photo downloader advanced options.

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Hello again and welcome back to our course on PSE 15.

By now you should have a pretty good idea of the things that you can do with the Organizer. There are still quite a few more things to cover and we’ll be coming back to many of those later on. But I want to turn my attention now to going through some of the other options for capturing images. I demonstrated capturing images from a phone very early on in the course.

Now we’re going to go through Image Capture or Import in more detail. We’re going to look at images from a regular camera and we’re also going to look at getting images from files and folders and, for example, getting images from a scanner. So that’s what we’re going to do in the next few sections.

We’re going to start with getting images from a camera. And there’s a lot of similarity here with getting images from the phone. I’m actually going to get images from a digital SLR. But I’m not going to do it by connecting the camera to my PC. I’m going to take the SD card from the camera, put the SD card into the PC and use that. Now in that sense what I’m going to show you is a pretty universal kind of procedure.

But there are a few differences to be aware of and some of those are related to the operating system that you’re using. For example, the version of Windows. But I’ll discuss one or two of those differences as we go along.

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So the first thing I’m going to do is to put my SD card into the card reader on my PC. And bearing in mind that I’m running this on Windows 10 when I do that you’ll see a little message come up towards the bottom of the screen, Select what happens with memory cards. If I click on that that gives me options, for instance, Import photos and videos, Photos, Organize and edit using Adobe Elements 15 Organizer.

Now I can set the system up so that when I insert an SD card it automatically goes to Adobe Elements 15 Organizer and I can manage the import from there. But on this occasion I’m just going to click away from that and instead I’m going to go up to the Import button on the left and say From Camera or Card Reader.

Now you remember this is the dialog that we used before to get images from a phone. If I click here you’ll now see I’ve got Camera or Card Reader as one of the options. I’m going to select that option. It searches for media. And this is actually a pretty big SD card, this one. I’ve got well over 2,000 images.

A total of 14.5 gigabytes of data there that I could import if I wanted to. Obviously how many you see will depend partly on the size of the card but also of course how many images you’ve captured on the card as well.

As far as the Photo Downloader dialog is concerned we’re going to look at the Advanced
Dialog down here a little bit later on in this section. And I’m also going to demonstrate Automatic Download, although I should point out that Automatic Download is not available on Mac.

There are some very minor differences between Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. If you do encounter any of these I think a quick Google will normally resolve any issues that you may have. As I mentioned already, I’m actually performing this on a Windows 10 device.

So in its very simplest form all I would do once PSE 15 has counted the number of images is click on Get Media and all of those images will be captured as a new batch of media into my catalog. So we could just click on Get Media and get these images but that’s pretty much what we did before. But what I want to demonstrate next is an automatic download and then we’ll come back and look at the Advanced Dialog after that.

So what I’m going to do is to close the Photo Downloader. I’m just going to cancel this and go into preferences. The page I need is Camera or Card Reader. Ignore the section at the top on files and just leave the Save Files In setting there to the default folder for now. We’re interested in the download options and at the moment we just have a generic device set up. So this is what happens under all circumstances.

You can set up specific download options for specific devices. I’m going to select the generic one. I’m going to edit that and change it from Show APD dialog, that’s the standard dialog. I’m going to change it to Automatic Download. Now let’s review the settings that we have down here.

Begin the download after a delay of 10 seconds. You can say immediately do the download with no dialog displayed. You’ll see that in just a moment. I’m going to leave it set to after delay of 10 seconds. Create subfolders using the shot date. That’s the default. That’s the one we’ve get set at the moment. I’m going to leave that set as the default but you could change those subfolders to just be today’s date, in which case they’d go into subfolder with today’s date. Or you can change one of the other shot date formats.

So for example, you could change it to a U.S. format like Month/Day/Year. Again I’m going to leave it at the default. And After copying do not delete originals. I’m going to leave that set for reasons I explained earlier on. And bear in mind that with large SD cards you may capture some images and then without deleting them you may go back, put the card back in the camera, go and take a load more images, come back and do this again.

You don’t really want to reimport the images that you’ve imported already. So the checkbox there, Copy new files only. Ignore already imported files. I normally have that set so it means I don’t finish up with loads of duplicates that I have to get rid of.

So I’m happy with those settings at the moment. I’m going to click on OK. I’m going to close the Organizer and now I’m going to go to my AutoPlay setting. So in Windows 10 I’m going to search on AutoPlay, go to AutoPlay Settings and check the setting for memory card. Note also there are settings there for Apple iPhone and removable drive. But it’s the memory card one I’m interested in at the moment.

You need to be careful when you set up AutoPlay because you may well have other applications, other apps on your device such as Dropbox, the Windows Photo app, the default Windows Photo app that may take over some level of automation. But if I in these AutoPlay default settings click on the list here for memory card, currently set on Take no action. I’m going to set it to Adobe Elements 15 Organizer.

Note that I have Elements 14 Organizer installed on this device as well as I explained earlier. But I also have options such as importing the photos and videos into OneDrive or opening a folder in File Explorer. Make sure you have this set to Adobe Elements 15 Organizer if you’re going to use automatic download. Having set that I’m going to close. And now what I’m going to do is to insert the card back into my device.

Card in device. It reads the images on the card yet again. Note it says Elements Organizer Photo Downloader. Having done that note the delay. Download will begin in 6 seconds, 5 seconds, etcetera. I can cancel at this point if I want to. If I don’t cancel then the import will occur. There’s quite a lot to do so this will take a little while.
So I’ve made myself a cup of coffee. It’s still importing. It takes a long time to import that many images into PSE 15. It’ll be a little bit longer yet.

So now we’re getting toward the end of the import of this very large batch of images. Let’s just see what happens when PSE gets to the very end.

It opens Organizer. Having captured those images it’s not importing them into the catalog. And what I can see is my last import batch of images. It’s a very large batch, over 2,300 images. And in fact what I’m going to do is to select all of these images and delete them because I want to do the import in a different way.

But before I do that let’s just go back into Preferences and look again at the Camera and Card Reader Preferences.

I don’t particularly like Automatic Download. I sort of consider it to be a little bit on the dangerous side shall we say. And what I prefer to happen is that if I’m not running Organizer but I put an SD card into the device I get that Download dialog. So what I’m going to do is change this back to Show APD Dialog (Standard).

Now in a moment I’m going to show and explain the APD Dialog Advanced and you may choose that option but I’m going to go for the standard one at the moment, click on OK. Leave all of the other options as they are and click on OK. What I’m going to do now is once again close the Organizer. Note that I haven’t changed the AutoPlay setting in Windows 10.

So it’s still the case that when I put the SD card in Windows will look to Elements 15 Organizer to see what to do. So let me put the card in. But now instead of going into that automatic download it opens the Photo Downloader and from here I can control what happens. Note of course that it’s searching for media yet again. Now this time of course it doesn’t automatically import them. It gives me the option of, for example, clicking on Get Media.

So that’s if you like a sort of semiautomatic approach to importing media from the SD card. Let me cancel that and go back into the Organizer.

What I’m going to do now is to delete the images that I just imported. So the batch that I imported from the phone begins there. The new one ends there. Right up to the top of the list. 2,342 items selected. Delete selected items from catalog. I’m also going to delete them from the hard disk, click on OK and I’m back to my familiar catalog contents. I’m going to import some of the images from that SD card but I’m now going to show you the Advanced Dialog. So back up to Import from Camera or Card Reader again. This time I’m going to click on Advanced Dialog.

Now many features of the Advanced Dialog are the same as they are in the standard dialog. So you can do things like choose a name for subfolders. You can also choose to rename files. And if you do rename files you have an option here, Preserve current file name in XMP. We’ve already looked at metadata briefly. If you want to keep the original name it’ll be stored in the metadata for the image. But if instead you wanted to rename the files, let’s suppose you wanted to rename them with the shot date plus a custom name.

And let’s suppose that I’m really looking to import some pictures of a particular type of rare bird that appeared in the garden a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to say Red Wing. That’s the sort of bird. And then there’ll be a number as well. Note I’ve checked the box there, Preserve current file name in XMP. I’ve got options here including fixing redeyes. I don’t think birds suffer from redeye. I can automatically import the images into an album, something that I mentioned to you earlier on.

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Most of the metadata that’s associated with the images will come from the images themselves. But there’s an opportunity here to add a couple of additional items of metadata, the Creator, that’s going to be me, and Copyright. I’ll just dream up a fictitious organization.

On the left we have a gallery of thumbnails of the images. I don’t want all of them. I only want the ones with the red wing pictures in them. So I’m going to click on Uncheck All. By default they’re all checked. And now let me just check the pictures with the red wings in them. Having done that I click on Get Media. The selected images are imported. They form my last import batch.

At any time if I wanted to go back to see the full content of the catalog in Media Browser I can click on Back there. But if I select one of the images, say that first one. Let’s take a look at its info. Metadata, you can see how I’ve got my author and copyright there now. And if I go up to the general category you can see the file name there, including the word Red Wing and the number.

So you’ve seen there some aspects of the use of the Advanced Photo Downloader. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!