PSE14: Tag and copy individual photos from stacks

Thomas,

Back to your original question:

I would like to mark individual photos within a stack (or batch, in german: "Stapel") in the organizer with a tag.
Then I want to search them via tag search und then I what to mark them all to copy them to another place (e.g. to a mobil phone).

Start with Greg's suggestion:

It's even worse with albums: if I add a single photo of the stack to the album, all of the photos in the stack are added to the album.

I have never noticed that before, but you are absolutely correct!  That makes no sense whatsoever.

The only suggestion I can make is to set the (single) tagged image in a stack as the top photo of the stack.  That way, if you search by tag, the stack will not have to be expanded to display the tagged photo. 

Then, your search does not show 'non matches' and you simply have to select all and 'export as new files'. This will only export the 'top photo'.

About 'albums'.

What is displayed in an album is the 'top photo' in stacks or version sets.

Albums (called 'collections' in older Elements versions) are lists of pointers to the stack or version set items containing the displayed 'top photo' in the catalog database. Albums are lists of stacks/version sets, not lists of individual photos and what you see displayed is the top photo.

If you change which item in a stack/version set is the top photo, your album will automatically display the new top photo. The pointer to the stack/version set won't be changed.

From the album, you can select an item in the browsing space, expand the stack, change some data (tag, caption, rating...) of another item in the stack, set as 'top photo' and collapse the stack. The new 'top photo' will show in the album.

The only way I can see would be to assign a simple keyword to the files in your choice for a stack.

Could you please explain this hint a little bit deeper, because my English ist unfortunately not the best.

What do you mean with "a simple keyword"? Do you mean an additional tag?

Yes, you don't use stacks to group your files, you assign a new tag (or you create an album).

You lose the ability of showing only one thumbnail to save space in the browsing space, but you can select any file from that 'collection / batch' by combining many tags in a multi criteria search;  you don't get 'non matches' files in the result of a search.

There are many situations when you get stacks of files with different tags or properties.

- you group files which have already different tags

- you have reason to edit tags only in a file of the already existing stack

- you stack files by 'visual similarity'

Assigning a new tag as suggested above will  be realistic only in rare cases. Most of the time, you'll have to select all found items in the result of your search and you'll unstack all, best matches as well as non matches. After unstacking, you can renew the search.

Unfortunately, you are right. From the beginning of the organizer, stacks have been thought of collections of files with the same properties except slight look differences. No practical workaround have been found to make selection of files inside stacks or version sets. The only way I can see would be to assign a simple keyword to the files in your choice for a stack.

http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Searches_are_showing

It's even worse with albums: if I add a single photo of the stack to the album, all of the photos in the stack are added to the album.

I have never noticed that before, but you are absolutely correct!  That makes no sense whatsoever.

The only suggestion I can make is to set the (single) tagged image in a stack as the top photo of the stack.  That way, if you search by tag, the stack will not have to be expanded to display the tagged photo.