A clean start - starting over with PSE 15 questions

deanw0507  wrote Hello All, I am starting all over.  I had a PSE 15 crash.  And, I will not use my one backup.  I'm just starting over. I have a book named, ‘Teach Yourself Visually – PSE 13’.  I found a section called, ‘Import Photos by Searching.’ By Going to ‘File – Get Photos and Videos – By Searching’ I wanted to give that a try.  But, I could not find the above in PSE 15.  I have reinstalled PSE 15.  I thought if it had this feature, then I could tell it to ‘get media’ with a size no less than ______.’  That way if I just did a big general sweep – ie. ‘Get Media from my C drive . . . I wouldn’t get a bunch of songs, cover art of those songs, and a million other things that I don’t want in PSE 15. Dean

The option 'By Searching' has been replaced by the 'Bulk import' feature.

I think nobody used that very misleading option. The only criteria were to skip hidden system folders and to skip small files.

I really don't see the point. Either you import from your 'Pictures directory' or you do know in which master folder to go to import. Skipping small files does not help much. 'By searching' makes users think they can filter the import on various custom criteria, and that's not true.

'Bulk' import is about as bad a choice, but I can imagine many users wanted this feature which is the default for a number of popular photo managing apps.

Does PSE 15 have anything on importing images where I can put in parameters before I do the importing?  Like I would tell it bigger than one mb and these two formats only: Jpg, PSD.  AND no audio!

No.

The organizer (and other catalog based softwares) only offer the power of the database to select files on multiple criterias for files already imported in the catalog.

What you can do:

- Import selectively from your chosen master folders one after the other ('Pictures', 'scans' then 'Internet downloads' for instance).

- select the media type:  photo, video or audio from the downloader options.

- In the downloader, you can take advantage of the features of the explorer to filter file by using the * template or by setting the date or the extension. For instance, you can filter files by using the template *.jpg to filter jpegs, sort by date or by size and select the correct range. Since the downloader opens the explorer, all those Windows explorer options are available.

. . . I am trying to efficiently deal with the mess that is my HD.

Yes, that is far from being obvious, especially if you want to clean up your drive as well as your catalog.

Moving files and folder trees to a certain extent may be advisable.

Avoiding duplicates is helped by the downloader filter.

Choosing if you want to delete from catalog only or catalog plus drive is another matter.

I have pics that I have taken, scattered all over my drive.  But when PSE 15 only does such a generalized search – then I got a bunch to delete inside of PSE and this is no fun.

Indeed, the generalized search requires a lot of deletion (or moves), but if you had the opportunity to filter before importing, the unwanted files would remain on your drive.

On the other hand, even a generalized search will ignore duplicates on your drives, keeping them present.