Photoshop Elements Organizer

worstje123  wrote Can somebody tell me what ' the difference between catalogs, folders and albums? I don't understand anything about this organizer!

- folders are used by your operating system (Win explorer or Mac finder) to tell you where your images are stored on your drive(s).

- catalogs are just like paper catalogs recording all the information about each photo file, its properties, its 'thumbnail' and its location in the 'folders'. Catalogs manage all that information via indexes to find and select photos by date, person or any custom criteria you have assigned.

- albums (also called 'collections') are a way of creating lists of photos in a given order. It's like 'playlists' you are creating by grouping audio files. Those lists are stored in the catalogs and they point to the 'records' of each file in the catalog. They are simply items in a list, they don't create duplicate files. If you want several albums (lists) of photos for different purposes, they can include pointers to the same image without file duplication.