Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

The Organizer

If you use Windows, the Organizer is where you keep track of your photos and start most of your projects for sharing your photos. You can see all your photos in the Organizer, assign keywords (called tags) to make it easier to find the pictures you want, and search for your photos in many different ways.

There are three main windows in the Organizer. Create is where you make calendars, greeting cards, album pages, and other fun stuff. Date View is an alternate way to look at and search for your photos, as explained in Figure 2-6. The Photo Browser is the most versatile of the three and your main Organizer workspace—that's what the rest of this section is about.

The Organizer stores the information about your photos in a special database called a catalog. You don't have to do anything special to get started—Elements creates your catalog (named My Catalog) automatically the first time you import photos. It's possible to have more than one catalog, but most people don't, since you can't search more than one catalog at a time.

Figure 2-5. The checkered background is Adobe's way of indicating that an area is transparent. (It doesn't mean you've somehow selected a patterned background.) If you place this photo into another image, all you'll see is the shell itself, not the checkerboard or the rectangular outline of the photo.If you don't like the size and color of the grid, ...