How to manage two intermixed collections.

[DoctorBrown]

I have been using Photoshop Elements for years. I am currently on 2022. I have many images that are 'keep' images of events, people and places. I also have many images that are unimportant but I keep, such as images of things around the house that I use for reference as I'm working on projects or fixing something. I would like to keep these two collections separated in the Organizer in some fashion.

Generally I organize my 'keep' images in folders by date: E:\My Pictures\<Year>\Year-Month Event. Many unimportant ones are intermixed in E:\My Pictures structure but also in D:\Users\<myuser>\Pictures. (relocated C:\Users\<myuser>\Pictures.) Both Pictures and My Pictures folders are listed in my Watched Folders. When I view All Media, this will intermix the two groups of images together in the organizer.  I mostly view images Sort by: Newest. Sort by Name doesn't display in a useful mannor in my collection.

I use tags and albums for some things but many, many images are not tagged this way.  Is there a way via separate catalogs, or other methods to view these collections separately? I'm thinking I would could move all unimportant ones to the D:\Users\<myuser>\Pictures structure and remove that from Watched folders. This could be a ton of work though. Moving files can mess with the file dates and that would be a problem for those without metadata. I also try to keep the file dates intack.

Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks

[Greg_S.]

It seems to me that the best method would be to hide the unimportant images.  You can do this by selecting multiple images and pressing Alt+F2.  Alternatively, you can use the Edit>Visibility>Mark as Hidden menu choice.

You can then use the Edit>Visibility menu to hide or show only the hidden files, or show all the files.

Older versions of Elements used to have a toggle button that allowed a user to hide files.  But now this feature is hidden.  😁

[DoctorBrown]

Good idea! Thanks.