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13.02.09

Workflow : Organising your images in Photoshop Elements

NAMING FOLDERS

Being organized and having an easy-to-understand, logical folder structure will mean that finding those important pictures becomes a painless and quick process

Before you start loading your images into Elements it is well worth taking the time to think about how you want to organise your files on the computer’s hard drive. Typically you may have a folder for the main types of image you shoot, say Family, Flowers, Holidays and Landscapes. Within these folders you may further sub-divide them.

So where do you put the images of grandma taken on holiday in Devon? Well you could copy the image to Holidays>Devon 2007 as well as Family>Grandparents but that would double your disk space needs and get confusing when you do any edits. Help comes with the aptly named Organize module.

By adding keywords to your images you can group them by subject, location or any other way you need. Because the Organizer is based upon a database which contains a snapshot of your images, together with a link to where on your computer the image is stored, an image can have multiple keywords but still only one copy is stored.

I have recreated the folder structure using Organizer Keywords and you can see that each image shown is tagged with both ‘Dartmoor’ and ‘Devon 2007’. Unlike using folders, the image can have as many keywords in as many categories as you need but there is only one copy of each image.

Using a system like this means you can keep your folder names simple; for example I have a folder for each year ‘08_Images’ containing a folder for each shoot. So for a shoot of Weaverham on 10th January this year the folder would be called ‘080110 Weaverham’.

I rename the images as I import them to add the date to the file name. This naming convention works for me; I would encourage you to work out your own system to suit your needs. The vital thing is to have a system which ensures unique names and stick with it!

GET ORGANIZED

Capturing involves copying your images from your camera to your computer and recording them in Elements Organizer. You can do this in one step from within the Organizer either directly from your camera or using a card reader.

GET CONNECTED

Select File>Get Photos and Videos>From Camera or Card reader from the menu (short-cut key Ctrl+G). With your memory card in your card reader or camera and connected to your computer choose the device from the drop-down menu.

CHOOSE YOUR DESTINATION

Select the folder on your hard disk where you want to store the images. If you haven’t already created a sub-folder you can optionally create one from this drop-down menu.

NAMING AND NUMBERING

You can rename your files as you capture them. The list gives a wide variety of naming schemes to choose from. If you don’t rename your files then sooner or later your camera will restart its automatic numbering scheme and create duplicates.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

Clicking the Advanced Dialog button shows this larger display, which shows thumbnails of the images before they are captured. This is useful if you want to select just some of the images. The Apply Metadata options on the right let you record the Author and Copyright information into each image as it is captured.

CAUGHT

Your images are captured and Elements creates thumbnails for each image. This may take a while depending upon your computer but is a one-off process.

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