How to Use the Organizer Workspace in Photoshop Elements 15

During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will take a whistlestop tour of the organizer workspace and go through the available links found under eLive, as well as the options, panels and view found under Media.

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

In this and the next few sections I’m going to be explaining quite a bit more about the Organizer. I’ll give you some more information about catalogs and albums and how exactly your images are stored when you use PSE 15.

If you’ve used a recent version of PSE you can probably skip these sections. In fact many experienced users of PSE don’t really use the Organizer at all or at least they use it in a very minimal way. And it may be that after you’ve found out about the Organizer you decide that you’ll be organizing your images in a different way and perhaps using PSE primarily for editing images and perhaps for making presentations.

If you aren’t familiar with the Organizer or you’ve only used it in a much older version I do suggest that you go through these sections because even if in the longer time you don’t use all of these features it’s very useful to understand quite a bit more about how, for example, your images are stored.

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In this first section on the Organizer I’m going to look at the Organizer workspace. And first of all I want to look at this bar up here and I want to select eLive. This takes me to the Elements Live page which contains a set of links. Some of the links go through to Help topics, some of them go through to learning material such as training videos.

There are normally many, many items on the eLive page and the eLive page does get updated from time to time. And if there’s a particular topic that you’re interested in then have a look on eLive to see if there’s additional information about it.

Now on the left you have a sort of filter. So at the moment I have everything selected. But if all I want is News that’ll give me the latest news about PSE. So for instance this link here, Take a quick tour of Photoshop Elements 15 is in the News category.

Similarly if you want some learning materials there are plenty of links here through to in many cases videos and so on with additional learning material that you might want to use as we go through the topics on the course.

So to go back to look at my Media click on Media. There are three more links on that bar, People, Places and Events and we’re going to look at all of those later in the course. Now let’s turn our attention to the bar down at the bottom here, particular to what’s at the left end.

Earlier on I showed you an Instant Fix and we’re going to be looking at Instant Fix in more detail in a few sections from now. We also saw the button there to take us through to the Editor. We’ve already played a slide show and Add Location and Add Event we’re going to again be looking at later on when look at Places and Events.

On the left there is a Hide Panel button. And Hide Panel hides the panel on the left. Show panel shows it again. There are quite a few facilities for hiding and showing things in the Organizer and the Editor. And when we have this panel on the left shown, it’s currently showing the folders that hold my media.

There is an alternative if I click on Albums to show me my albums and at the present I don’t have albums. So let me just click back to Folders again and I’ll see the folders and that lists the folders that contain any of the media in my media browser view here.

Now following on from that if I were to click on one of these folder names, for example that one, what I’ll see is just the images in that folder. And in view of how I’ve stored these images from my camera that means the pictures that I took on that particular shot date.

Having selected a specific date if I want to go back to all media again there’s a button there All Media and that takes me back to the full list. Don’t forget as I showed you earlier on the View Media Types submenu there which determines which types of media are shown in the Media Browser at any particular time.

There are a couple of other things that I’d just like to mention here and I’ll go into these in a lot more detail later on. One of them is that if you’re looking at the Media Browser and saying well that looks absolutely nothing like mine it may be that you have the alternative view of the Media Browser. What I have here is what’s called the Adaptive Grid View.

But if I go to the View menu and check Details you see an alternative view. I still see all of the pictures but I have additional information under each one, such as the shot date and time. And also each of the images has its correct relative size, its correct aspect ratio and so on. If I go back into the Adaptive Grid View then everything is made to fit neatly into that grid with everything sort of squashed up together. I’ll tell you a lot more about that in a couple of sections from now.

And the other thing I need to mention here, and this is something that’s very important to get to grips with early on in your use of PSE, these images which are in the folders and you’ve seen the folder list on the left. They are not stored in the catalog. These images are not magically moved into the catalog in some way. They continue to exist in those folders.

What we have in the catalog is information about the images, various items of technical information, various pieces of information we add such as captions and people that are in the images and so on. And also for each image we have a little thumbnail of the image as well so that we can represent it in the Media Browser even when the image is not actually available, such as when it’s on a removable disk or something like that. So just bear both of those things in mind as we continue to work through this section.

And perhaps one other point I should mention here. If you look at the list of folders on the left the first group of which correspond to the shop dates of the images that you’re looking at in the media browser, towards the end of the list there is a folder, PSE 15 Exercise Files. And as soon as I saved that MP4 file that was my sample output from Exercise 01 in a folder because that MP4 file is known to the catalog the folder that it’s in appears in the list of folders on the left.

So any time that I now want to access what’s in that exercise files folder all I need to do is click on there and normally I would see my MP4 file. Now of course I don’t at the moment because I’ve effectively applied that media types filter. But if I put in there Video there I will see my MP4 file again.

Having switched back to showing all media there’s another important control here. To the left above the media browser we have a Sort By control. And the available options are Newest images first, Oldest images first. At this point you may remember that preference that we referred to earlier on in the course. That’s probably a good idea now to look at this and bear in mind that I’m looking at the newest images first and decide whether that would be your preferred default order for sorting images.

I can sort the images by name or I can sort them by import batch, which is not necessarily the same as ordering by date because for instance if I’m importing images say from a camera and a phone at different times the dates may overlap. So this is based on the import batch date.

Towards the top right of the workspace we access to other very important options. The first of these options is Create. And if I click on the dropdown I have a list of the artifacts that can be created in the Organizer. These include Photo Book, Greeting Card, Video Collage, CD Jackets, Facebook Covers, really quite a long list of things that you can make. And many of these we’re going to be covering during the course.

And having produced an artifact or maybe just having one or two particular images that you like you also have Share options over here. Share via Facebook, email, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, etcetera.

And just above the Create and Share buttons we have a Search facility. If you’ve used PSE before you’ll be very familiar with the rather strange search facility whereby there was a little box here that you could barely see and it was difficult to enter the term or terms that you wanted to search on. But now if you click on Search it takes you to what is in effect a separate search screen. And we’re going to be looking at Search later on in the course. So we’ll come back to this then. In the meantime if I click on Grid over on the top left I’m back into the Organizer and Media Browser as normal.

Let’s now go to the bottom right of the Organizer workspace and we see there Keyword/Info and that’s another panel that we can show and hide. Let me click on Show. If I have an image selected such as this one, for example, the information includes the name of the physical image, the size of the file, the shot date, the location of the image on my device, and then some metadata. And what metadata you have depends on the device that you captured the image with. So for instance, having captured this on an iPhone you can see the camera data.

So Make: Apple, Model: iPhone 5S and so on. And then there is also a history of this particular image. Now I’m going to look at information in a lot more detail later on. And also later on I’m going to look at tags, the fact that you can add keywords, people tags, places tags, events tags to an image as well. And we’ll cover all this later in the course. If I don’t need to see tags and information at the moment I just hide that panel by clicking on the button again.

The next control to look at is the Zoom control. And if I use the Zoom control, I’m going to drag it over to the right first. And as I drag it to the right I’ll make each image bigger until eventually I see one image at a time.

And when I see one image at a time I can then step through the images using the scroll bar on the right. At any time I can return to in my case the Adaptive Grid View just by zooming back again. And how many images you see and how big they are of course is determined by the Zoom setting.

In the controls on the left here at the bottom one or two of these we haven’t looked at yet. Let’s look at Rotate first. If I select an image, say that one, and click on Rotate the image will rotate. Click on Rotate again it rotates again. And there’s a little dropdown on the right whereby I can rotate it in the opposite direction if I want to.

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Now apart from that rotate option right next to it there is an Undo button. So if I undo the last rotate and again on the right there’s a little dropdown that lets me redo the last operation. So Undo and Rotate are very usefully positioned down there on the left as well.

And below those buttons there’s a little status bar which actually tells you how many images you are currently looking at in the media browser and it gives you the date range that covers the shot dates for those images. If I make a selection, so for instance supposing I click on that one and that one and that one I’ve then just selected three images and it tells me that I just have three items selected.

And at the right hand end of the Status Bar is the name of the current catalog. It’s got the default name My Catalog at the moment and I’m going to talk about catalogs in the next section.

And apart from all the things that I’ve covered in this section don’t forget the menu system up here. If I click on one of the menus such as Edit as you would normally expect any items that are not currently available are grayed out. Any that are not grayed out are currently available. And where there are keyboard shortcuts they’re usually shown on the right of the menu system.

So that’s been a whistle stop tour of the Organizer workspace. Don’t forget the Elements Organizer PDF. There’s a section in there on the workspace with even more information and I’ve mentioned several times during this section that I’ll be coming back to various aspects later on. But for now that’s it. In the next section we’re going to look in more detail at catalogs so please join me for that.

Simon C

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!