Photoshop Elements Organizer

I used PSE Organizer with 11 and 14. When it works, it's great. My problem was it crashed too much with both my scrap stuff and photos in it. My mom has the same problem with it crashing on 12 also. I know Adobe claims there's not a problem with the number of items. And Melissa Shanhun uses it with no problems, so I don't know if it's a computer spec thing or what. I know I only had about 40,000 items in it when it was crashing on me. My mom's catalog is much smaller - like 5,000 or so? And it will still crash. Oh, and don't move things outside of it once you've added. Otherwise it gets mad.

I tagged kit previews if there was something specific I bought it for, or if it was Project Life. I also added a store name tag when I first started scrapping because I bought a little from everywhere. That was handy to only bring up kits allowed for challenges. Usually, designers label things well enough that PSE Organizer can find it. I didn't tag individual elements unless I used a different word for it. Like a Viewfinder, most designers call something else (I assume for copyright reasons).

It has a cool feature where you can have it search by similar, and it'll find all your red round objects. The only caveat is you have to let it presearch? (not positive what wording it uses) your catalog, and that can take a long time if you have a lot.

If I recall correctly, you can send things from Organizer straight to PSE? Oh, and make sure you write the metadata to the files. The last time I used it, it was not an automatic process, and had to be done manually. Since you put in the work, you'll want the reward!

 

I have just started using organizer. I'm using pse 12. There are things I love and things I don't love so much. For now, I only have supplies, but I am considering photos, too.

The presearching @bestcee mentioned is called indexing. And I think it's only for the visual searches.

I originally intended to only use it for the previews of my stash. I wanted my own store front, basically, that would give me all of my previews of everything, so I stop buying every single pretty thing I see. I was going to tag it, as if it was a store... by theme, collection (byoc, m3, ST, etc), even by some basic colors

Somewhere along the path of uploading every single preview, I decided to try using it for everything. The program is much faster searching for "file type is .png and filenames that include 'stitch'" for example, than my computer is in the windows browser/file explorer.
Windows explorer/browser/thing will not allow you to tag png or psd files, but you can in PSE Organizer, but I haven't tried writing that data to the file yet.

I also wanted to sort my templates better than just "by photos", but I haven't come up with a good idea for that yet. I have more than 300 "1 photo" templates, for example, and I'd like to skim through them super fast, like... this one has a vertical photo, this one has a horizontal one... this one is square, that one is big photo.... lots of paper pieces... etc.
I do not need to tag all of them this extensively, because it's easy to browse the 12 "8 photo" templates I have.
I get overwhelmed when I start to remember that templates do not need to be kept "as is" which stops me from tagging them... also, pse organizer can show you the previews of the psd files, so when sorting my name, I have about 3 of the same image, which is annoying. And stacking... ugh. Takes forever to skim through everything to stack it, even though I know it will make things faster later on. (Stacking just means you only look at one, rather than all of them- awesome for alphas, or color variations of journal cards or alphas.)

Anyway. I still have some time to put in to make Organizer be what I want it to be... a store front, and now, a search engine. But i love that I can drag from organizer into PSE just like I can from windows, and I can "view in explorer" if I need to. I can look at my folders exactly as they are in windows explorer if I want, or search by collection if I prefer. I can watch folders of designers I frequently purchase from (or CT for).

Now... before I move stuff to my designer folder for importing into pse organizer, I do tag the jpg files in explorer. (Basic tagging : papers, previews or journal cards, and then also template photos) and the reason is because if I somehow mess up organizer and/or decide it's not for me, my papers, previews, journal cards, and templates are still tagged, and they are also tagged in my back up EHD. I will not lose all the work, even though I may lose a lot of the work, that I have put into finding everything in my stash.
I have not backed up my catalog because the catalog is a duplicate of file information. Mostly it's a space and time issue, so right now, knowing that I've done the basic tagging in windows, I'm okay to risk it. Theoretically, when everything is tagged as I want it, aND I write the info to the files, I can then replace the info in my back up EHD, and then I won't really lose any of my tagging work, even if my EHD were to crash. (Unless my 2nd ehd /backup also crashes, at which point I'd be devastated)

Omg. I am so sorry about this chapter book. Lol. I apparently had tons to say...

 

I liked the Organizer while I was using it, which was until I started using Lightroom in 2011. I only tagged a little but I always captioned my photos. And now I'm so glad I did because those captions are still readable today, either by Lightroom or my Mac file system, making it easier to journal on scrapbook pages made with photos from the last decade. I definitely think it's worth using if you're scrapping with PSE and not using Lightroom.

 

It's been ages since I used the PSE organizer, I switched to Lightroom for everything and I love it. However, there are some pretty powerful search features in the organizer. It's fast because it creates a catalog of your files as opposed to having to actually "read" them in a browser type program (your system's file browser, or bridge). You can save metadata to jpg and psd files (just have to remember to write it manually as I don't think the automatic option is there yet), but I don't think you have the option to save the tag info for png files in the metadata with PSE Organizer yet.

 

Once you go Lightroom, you won't go back! LOL.

I thought of something else for you. Have you used the smart album feature for your photos? You could have it pull your PL photos for the week into a folder to go through. (I do this with Lightroom, and I love it!)

 

I have been a PSE user since Ver 6 but stopped using it in Ver 11 as it had changed so much and similar to what Courtney said above, it kept crashing on me and really made the PSE run a lot slower. I have Ver 14 as well but same things happens so I just gave up on it. Never had that problem with the earlier versions and I really loved it. I just use my File Explorer now and simply drag stuff into PSE when I want it. I use an action/script after I have dragged a heap of elements over to PSE which then places all the elements onto my page and closes each file down automatically for me and then makes a note as to what the element's name is in the Layers palette.
I also just installed a little program from Tumasoft that allows me to see PSD files in my explorer (as well as my brushes)....... very seamless and works a treat.

 

@wombat146 where's that script?!

 

@klee73010 Kristina they are script/actions by Christy VanderWall and available on her blog SpeedScraps http://speedscraps.blogspot.com.au/p/free-scripts.html
They are fairly old so some of them are obsolete in the fact that you can do some of the stuff in the PSE, like deleting Hidden Layers. There are others that I haven't tried either so not sure what they are like. I have the Scatter Things one and its a bit of fun too

But the Copy & Close is terrific one. The install files look a bit dated as well but this is how I installed mine and they are working perfectly.

For Windows 7
Script file (.jsx file) goes into:




Action file (.atn file)
I simply loaded this through the front panel in the Actions panel.

Hope that helps

 

I love this script. Christy recently rehosted them on Dropbox.