How to Organize Photos Using an Album in Photoshop Elements 2019

Watch the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial. Learn about managing and organize photos and applying keywords and tags. We will show you how to create new category and subcategories, how to assign a keyword to an image, how to add an icon to a category and how to delete keywords.

Welcome back to our course on PSE 2019. In this section, we’re going to look at Albums. If you’ve used albums before, particularly in a recent version of PSE then I’m sure you can skip this section.

First of all, I’ll answer the question, what is an album. I’ll show you how to create an album, how to subsequently edit an album, how to change the album sort order, that’s the order of the items in the album. And finally, we’ll take a quick look at creating instant albums.

First of all, then what is an album? In the days before digital photography, albums were very commonly used. They comprised books, usually quite large, thick books with thick cardboard pages and somebody might take some photos. Have them professionally developed and printed.

They would stick those photos in the book. Keep the book as a souvenir perhaps of a vacation or they might give the book, the album, to a friend as a gift.

Albums in the context of PSE though are a little bit different because an album in PSE is a sort of semi-permanent collection of images.

You may choose to make what we would now call a photobook out of it but you may also use it, for example, just to email some images to a friend or you might make a collage or a slideshow from it. So, it’s a semi-permanent collection.

If I select a number of images in the media browser, say those six, that is a selection. When I move away and do something else normally that selection will be lost. That’s a temporary selection.

The idea behind an album is that I could take that selection and sort of call it something and keep it safe somewhere. I might be able to use that selection later on for one of the purposes I’ve just described. So, really an album is a semi-permanent selection.

Earlier this year, I took a trip to a place called Clumber Park, which is in Nottinghamshire in England. I took some pictures there and I’d like to make an album of five or six of those pictures.

So, what I’m going to do is to go to the panel on the left. So far, we’ve always had the Folders option selected but I’m going to select Albums. If I expand using the wedge here, My Albums, I’ll see that I don’t have any. I’m going to click on the plus sign on the right and say New Album. You can categorize albums. I could say New Album Category but for the moment let’s just say, New Album.

What happens is I get a New Album panel at the right. I’m going to type in a name for the album. I’m going to call it Clumber Park 2018. If I have album categories, I could assign it to a category here, but I don’t.

And then, all I need to do to add images to that album is to drag and drop them into what’s called the Media Bin within the new album panel. And now, I can start dragging in the images.

I’m going to start with that one. So, having selected it to click, note the hand cursor there. Drag it into the media bin. There’s my first image. I’m going to also have this image. In fact, I can add multiple images at once.

So, I think, I’m going to take that one, Control key. There we go. There are four there. Click and drag, drop them into the media bin. My album now has six images in it.

If I click on OK the album is created. You’ll see that it appears in the Albums panel on the left. See that each of the images in the album now has a little icon. If I hover over the icon it says in album Clumber Park 2018.

One of the things that’s very useful about albums is that you can use an album as a filter. If I want to see in the media browser only the images that are in that album. If I click on the album in the panel on the left, I filtered the media browser just to show the images in the album. Any time I want to go back to all media, as usual back to all media.

Once you have an album, you may well want to edit it in a number of ways. If I right click on Clumber Park 2018, the options I have include Delete. If I click on Delete, I will be asked to confirm.

Deleting an album does not delete the images in it. It is only a selection and therefore the images are safe, but you will lose the album.

You can rename an album. If I choose to rename all, I’m able to do is to put a new name in. If I want to edit the album that panel reappears on the right. I could rename it there. I can also change the images that are in the album.

Let’s suppose, I want to delete one of those images. I can select it, say that one. Having selected it, if I click on the trashcan icon at the bottom it, deletes the selected image.

Adding additional images to the album is done exactly the same way that I added them when I created the album. In fact, when you’re working with an album, let me just OK this.

You can also add an image to an album by dragging the album onto the image. Let me go back down to my Clumber Park pictures. If I click and hold, I can drag the album down on to one of the other pictures and that picture is now in the album.

When I created the album, I added the images in pretty random sort of order. I may well want to order them more specifically. Let me click on Clumber Park again just to see those six images.

If you look above the images, you’ll see the Sort By dropdown and the options are Newest, Oldest, Name, Import Batch, but one of them is Album Order. And if I want to sort this in a specific order, if I select that option, you’ll see that the images each have a little number in the top left-hand corner. That’s their current sequence in the album.

If I wanted to change that sequence, let’s suppose I wanted to put the last one. The one that’s currently number six, to be the second one. If I select it and then drag and drop it between the first and second that becomes number two. Note that all the numbers have been changed. And that is now my saved album order. You can manually set the album order like that.

And finally, there is another way of creating an album, what’s called an Instant Album. You create this from the contents of a folder. Let me go back to the Folders option in the pane on the left. Then, what I’m going to do is to select a particular folder, say that one.

If I wanted to make an album just with the images in that folder, if I right click it says Create Instant Album, and that album has been created with the media from this folder. If I go back to the Albums option, you’ll see my new album there.

Its name is the name of the folder, but obviously, you know I could go in there now and rename it. Change the images that are in the album and so on. That’s a great way of getting an album started just from the contents of a folder.

One other thing to mention here is that there is an option to automatically make albums when you capture images. We’ll see that a little bit later on in the course, so don’t forget that. That could be quite a time-saving option as well.

One other thing, I haven’t mentioned before. If I just go back to Folders, this doesn’t really have anything to do with albums by the way. There are actually two views of your folders.

The view we’ve got here is what’s called the View as a List option. You can also see the folders that hold your images as a Tree view. And this Tree view reflects the structure of the folders on your device.

In fact not only on your device but on attached network storage, removable storage, and so on. So if you want to see where physically on your attached devices, on your network and so on your images are stored, Tree view can be useful as well. I’m not going to go into that now. But for those of you who are interested in knowing exactly where everything is trying the Tree view option because it can be very informative and very helpful.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Adam Lacey

Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats.When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.