Distinction between Album and Events

Reg1987  wrote What seems missing is the ability to view all the events for one event group.  You can view all the pictures for the Christmas group, but you can't view one stack with a cover picture for each year. Am I using Albums or Events wrong?

The explanation may be that you are ignoring the basis of your organization: keywords (= tags).

- Events are a just special kind of keywords. Keywords can be ordered by your own categories and subcategories.

- Albums are not. There is no standard definition of 'albums' for photo organizing softwares. For some it's just a special folder, or a copy of selected items. For the organizer it's a simple sorted list pointing to files in your catalog. Think of albums as 'playlists' just like with audio files. In older Elements versions as well as in the current implementation of Lightroom, albums were better called 'collections'.

Stacks or Version sets are similar to albums, they can group pictures for various puposes.

In your case, if you forget the 'Events' tool in Organizer and simply consider 'My Events' as a simple keyword category just like in Organizer versions up to 10, you simply create a subcategory under the 'My Events' category: 'Christmas'. You can select either 'Christmas 2016' subcategory, or the subcategory 'Christmas' itself. In the last case, you get all Christmas photos.

I don't like the new 'Events' category. It has been introduced to mimic other consumer photo managing softwares. It is simply based of grouping files by dates. With the old standard Events keyword categories, you precisely distinguish two separate events in the same period, or photos taken during several days or parts of days. I don't use any of the new categories introduced in PSE11.

- I have a custom 'My events' keyword category with many subcategories.

- I don't want face recognition: identifying people and being able to retrieve them by any criteria: first name, last name, nickname, familiy branch... for my genealogy and family history require more efforts at first, but are so much more powerful.

- I understand the use of geotagging. But only my smartphone photos are geotagged and I prefer my own places hierarchies rather than the Google Maps one. You can use both at the same time... which is more work.

The process of managing by your own keywords categories and categories lets you organize anything freely.

- keywords and keyword categories can be written to files for sharing with other softwares and/or as an additional safety to backups. Not albums, stacks, version sets.

- keywords can be managed in a hierarchical tree of subcategories as suggested above. Very often, instead of creating a hierarchy, you'll assign many keywords to an item: for instance to identify persons. I do know some people by first name, by married name or nickname... The search is then the combination of several criteria.

- on the other hand, albums can be sorted in your custom order, not keywords. That's why they are the favourites to prepare a batch ouput; I use a lot of temporary albums which I delete after the output is finished.

I would like to stress how easy and powerful is the new advanced search feature of PSE15. I can find instantly all photos of a person named 'John' at an event 'wedding' which took place in 'Angers' by typing:

John + wedding + Loire

(Angers is a town in the 'Pays de la Loire' district).

You can mix custom people names, custom events, custom geography hierachy and even parts of a caption or a note.