OUT! Damned Organiser!

[denno]

Greetings.  I'd like not to have Organizer on my computer, but I see it is part and parcel of Elements. (I have 11.)  Therefore I'd like to disable it and be sure it never imports a picture from my hard drive or an SD card, and never retains a copy or even thumbnail of anything I scan or work on in Elements.

It may be a fine picture organizer, but I can do it myself.  Much more particularly, I want to control where the scanned documents are and who sees them.  I intensely dislike the modern trend for autonomous programs and bots to gather up information they are not invited to.Can I tell it not to acquire anything I do not put there manually?  (Which I will never intentionally do.)
Second thing---when I try to open it and see if it in fact is full of every picture on my computer, two things happen.  First it shows a waiting symbol and says the catalogue is being built.  Second, there's a popup window saying, "An app on your PC needs DirectPlay" and invites me to install it.  When I tell it to skip that step, it says DirectX cannot be started.  If I click to minimize the program, it grays out and becomes non-responsive.
So does this mean (or does it not?) that Organizer isn't working anyway?  And is not collecting my files?

25 years ago, AOL wanted to become the lobby for all our social activity.  (Take this poll!)  Now FaceBook is totally out of hand in its goal to connect absolutely every bit if information in the world.  I wish these programs and services were all OPT-IN.

Thanks,

denno

[99jon]

Organizer and Editor are separate applications. There is no need to launch Organizer if you don’t need it. You can also prevent new photos being added.

From the Organizer menu go to

File >> Watch Folders

Remove all folders from the list and nothing will be imported automatically.

[denno]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll repeat that I cannot open Organizer; hence cannot see what it may be doing in the background.

Shall I assume that if I simply never open it it will never collect or save anything?
Shall I assume that the two popups I get amount to Organizer's not being able to open?  And not being able to function at all?  Or do I assume too much?
Pardon my OCD.

denno

[99jon]

If no catalog has been created, then there will be nothing in Organizer. So just don't launch it.

[MichelBParis]

What are you afraid of?

No need to worry:

- you are always free to use the organizer or not, to organize the storage with the explorer or to use other softwares like the Lightroom, Bridge or other photo managing softwares.

- The organizer does not store any image file. You are totally free to store them where you want and there can't be any file duplication.

- The thumbnails shown by the organizer are only very small versions of your files to organize them visually from your browsing space.

The organizer is a powerful toolkit around a catalog. It only stores the real location of each file on your drives, it stores links, not copies.

My comparison:

If you want to go somewhere, you can walk there or you can use a car. The car is a powerful tool, but it does not decide where you have to go. Same for the organizer. It can work like the Exporer to move, rename or delete files, to change the subfolders hierarchies, but that's very secondary for your organization. You can add keywords, captions, ratings, notes, set up and manage keywords categories  without bothering about where the files are on your drive. That virtual organization is the strength of catalogs. Instant retrieval of multicriteria searches, easy way to group files into albums, stacks, version sets without any duplication.

There is something to understand whether you want to use the organizer or not. The organizer will follow the rules you have chosen. For instance, the folder structure where you want to import your files from your camera, the location of your catalogs. Some of those rules are applied by default and you have to change them if you prefer. The organizer does not decide for you.

So, to add to what 99jon said about 'watched folders', you may have a real problem to set up your preferences to avoid using the organizer if you cannot open it. You are free not to use the organizer, but that implies changing some default options such as disabling watched folders, automatic face tagging, autocreations, searching for missing files. Those maintenance background tasks are useless and time consuming if you don't use the organizer.

That's why I think that it would be better to find the real reason of the error message you get about a missing module or codec when installing. There is probably something wrong in your PSE installation.

[RonSH]

I have recently installed the latest versions of Elements & Premiere Elements which includes the common Organiser. When I have completed a video edit and produced I delete the project. I note, however, even where all 'watched folders' are unticked etc. a new folder is created in Organiser, specific to the video project worked. This folder contains any images etc edited together with eg screen shots ... seemingly anything other than the copy image in my project folder (for editing I always create an image folder which only contains copies of the originals held in Windows Picture/Video files).

When deleting a project, what is the best proceedure? Since I only use image copies, is it OK to delete the images & folder in the specially created Organiser folder including delete from hard disk without affecting the primary image/video files held on HD and where appropriate linked within Organiser.

To suit my purposes I use the Organiser catalogue as a very convenient image date viewing source ... much easier than going direct into the Windows Pictures files with its miriad of search possibilities.

[99jon]

You could check your Windows settings – see if this link helps:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/9759211