PSE 14 How to restrict what is in my library?

[NLLinAZ]

How do I restrict my library to just what is in my pictures folder instead of my entire hard drive? There are thousands of images that I don't want in my library.

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

langbecker@gmail.com  wrote

How do I restrict my library to just what is in my pictures folder instead of my entire hard drive? There are thousands of images that I don't want in my library.

You mean in your catalog?

While it is easy to avoid importing files from other folders or drives than your pictures folder, it may be a hassle to delete or hide the photos already imported from other folders/drives.

- If you have just imported from all your computer, the easiest way is to create a new catalog and to import only from the pictures folder. Then you can delete the former catalog.

- If you have already organized  with tags, captions, stacks, version sets or albums, your only choice is to delete the files from other folders, subfolder by subfolder... and you'll soon discover that the slowest feature in the organizer is to delete pictures from the catalog. Instead of deleting, it would be much faster to 'hide' non relevant pictures;

The main problem, beside the slowness of deleting, is that you can't select pictures from a folder WITH all pictures from the subfolder.

My suggestion:

From the Explorer/Finder, rename your 'pictures' folder TEMPORARILY 'pictures_temp' for instance. As a result, the next time you start the organizer, all the files from the pictures_temp folder AND its subfolders will be shown as missing.

Select all, and apply a keyword like 'to_keep' to all the selected files.

Close the organizer, rename the pictures folder back.

When you re-open the organizer, the files are no longer missing.

Use the keywords panel to check the 'to_keep' keyword. All files in the pictures folder and only them will be shown.

right click and choose 'exclude from selection'.

Now, all files to be deleted or hidden from the catalog are displayed. Select all and either try to delete (with thousands of photos, there is a big risk that you won't have enough memory to perform the delete) or hide those files (right click, visibility and check both mark as hidden and hide hidden files).

My advice: first try to hide, that makes your browsing experience as you want withot wasting much disk space. You can delete easily by small batches afterwards.

[NLLinAZ]

Thank you for your valuable help.

Was there a way before all this happened to have the catalog only look in My Pictures instead of looking for all the pictures throughout my hard drive?

[MichelBParis]

langbecker@gmail.com  wrote

Thank you for your valuable help.

Was there a way before all this happened to have the catalog only look in My Pictures instead of looking for all the pictures throughout my hard drive?

There always was a 'folders' view which could display the files by browsing a folders tree. The big change came with PSE11. However the problem to select and display a the files of a master folder AND the files in its subfolders was already there in PSE6 which is the oldest version installed on my computer. I remember that for older versions, there was a way to display the files in the folders panel differently,  all files displayed in sections by subfolder. That probably allowed selecting several subfolders of the same level at the same time. Not sure that would have made solving your problem much easier. Maybe users with older versions (maybe PSE4 or 5) could check.

Any way, the 'folders' view before PSE11 was rather buggy.

Photoshop Elements 6/7/8 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)