Organizer's Share feature, which lets you email photos from within Organizer, requires special handling for Gmail accounts. And by the time you discover this you may have added some Email Profiles in Organizer that you want to delete but can't figure out how. In this post I'm going to deal with both.
In Photoshop Elements 2020 Organizer's Preferences there's an Email section for entering email accounts to use when you click the Share button (upper right corner of Organizer). I wanted to use a Gmail account. When I clicked the Validate button, which tests the email credentials entered, it failed -- even though I was using the correct credentials.
It turns out that to use a Gmail account you must enable 2FA (aka. multifactor authentication) in your Google account. Once that's done you can create App Passwords within Google's Security settings. Each app password is dedicated to a specific program, which then allows that program to bypass the usual 2FA prompts.
In the process I discovered that once you create a profile -- even if it fails to work -- it will remain present in the drop-down list of Email Profiles. What if you want to delete obsolete or invalid profiles?
Here's how (in Windows):
Close Organizer.
Hold down the Windows key and press the R key to open a Run prompt.
Type %appdata% and press enter. This will open the Roaming folder in your Windows User profile.
Open the Adobe folder.
Open the Elements Organizer folder.
Open the 18.0 folder.
Open the Organizer folder.
In the Organizer folder you should see a file named "email_accounts". It's an XML file. Make a backup copy of it.
I used NotePad++ to open it but you can double-click on it and it'll open in Notepad.
In it you'll see each account's details in sections bounded by <account> and </account>.
Delete any sections that you no longer wish to appear in the Email Profiles drop-down list (including the aforementioned <account> and </account>).
Save the file.
That's it. You will have cleaned up the list of email profiles.
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Our photos and the PSE2020 Catalog are on an external USB drive so it can be connected to any PC and used by me or any family member. So far this works fine. (It would be better if Adobe added multi-user capability to the Catalog but carrying a drive around is an old fashioned alternative.)
The catch with Organizer's Sharing feature is that when you click Share > Email it simply starts to prepare a photo for emailing. You are not given the option to choose which Email Profile (i.e., which email address) you wish to use. This is an oversight I hope Adobe will fix (along with associating a separate set of contacts for each Email Profile).
If you have multiple users of the same Catalog you have three choices:
1. Select your account in Edit > Preferences > Email and let everyone send from your account. BTW, everyone will have to populate the Contacts in PSE2020 because the Share function doesn't let you enter an email address manually -- you must select it from an existing Contact. (Adobe should offer the ability to enter a recipient's email address manually.)
2. Tell everyone to go to Edit> Preferences> Email and select their account before using Share. Everyone will then have to remember to do that before using Share because the last-used account will remain in effect until changed.
3. Buy and use Microsoft Outlook on every PC. The advantage of this is that PSE2020's Share function will open an outgoing Outlook message on the PC in which it's running. That instance of Outlook will have its particular user's email account and contacts ready to use. To me using Outlook is clearly the best approach for emailing from within Organizer.
(Yes, you can export photos to a folder, then open an email program and attach or insert the photos, but I'm trying to keep it simple for family members. If Adobe is going to include a built-in share-via-email feature why not make it fully usable?)
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