Thinking about buying Elements

[arthurm73874765]

I'm thinking about buying elements and I'm not sure if the program will interfere with the way I store and share my photographs

[John Waller]

How do you currently store and share your photographs?

[Peru Bob]

You don't need to use the Organizer.  I use Windows Explorer.

[Glenn 8675309]

I play with organizer, I don't rely on it.

[arthurm73874765]

Thank you.
What I envisage doing is that when I upload a photo to a folder, I would
access Elements to carry out edits in the same way as I would do with other
editing programs and then save it back to my original folder. I'm not
looking for Elements to organize my photos in any way.

[MichelBParis]

I'm notlooking for Elements to organize my photos in any way.
By @arthurm73874765

There is no such thing as a program that thinks for you.

• You may be happy with the Explorer or Finder offered by your operating system;  happy with the default choices they provide to choose where you "store" your images and organize them in folders hierarchies.
• You may want to take advantage of a free set of organizing tools which let you "be the boss " and specify your preferences.

Basically, the key functions are to browse and display  the images in your computer better than the default OS Explorer/Finder.

The killer advantage is for me the speed and ease to retrieve images from a catalog of some hundred thousand images, based on a combination of criteria and categories/keywords I have documented.

I absolutely need to group my images in albums, version sets, stacks...

The backup function is a bit original as it can restore both the image files and the catalog.

What makes people think the organizer will decide about organization is that there are also optional automatic tools (most of which I don't use myself).

- people recognition

- geotagging

- search for visual similarity

- automatic tagging based on visual analysis.

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

@arthurm73874765 Get the 30-day free trial before purchasing.

Jane

[Glenn 8675309 · Accepted solution]

PSE's Organizer can be equated wth an old library card catalogue:  It is a snapshot of an image (A thumbnail) with some information (meta data) about the and where the image is-  Organizer does nothing to your original image.

You can tell organzier exactely where to look for images.   I actaull have images on 4 hard drives, but only have organizer montior things on one drive.

When I first used organzier I told it to find all images all all hard drives-BIG MISTAKE. It will find every single icon a prgram uses and every single image a program uses for whatever reason.

You can have Organzier actually delete your original images if you want- I don't talk about it much so people generally wont do it.   

You can make backups of just the catalogue (All those cards in the catalogue- 1 card perd image) or the catalogue and the image.   Many of us have over 100,000 images (I have about 225,000 last time I checked) on multiple hard drives.

If you move your images, manually move the folders from one drive to another the Organzier  will "lose them"---- any moving of folders / albums (collection of images) will have to been done using organizer for organzier to keep track of things.

It's easy to say "to heck with it" delete all the catalogues and start over- if you manully change the location of images.

A PROBLEM USERS ENCOUNTER:   Manually moving images (outside of organizer) and losing tags they have added to images.   Databases (a catalogue) can become corrupted.    With organzier many users do not create backups from within organizer, they use "Sam's backup software" to make backups--- backups for organizer need to be made using organizer. 

Here's a link to the trial version- it's good for 30 days, and is 100% fully functional.

https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/free-trial.html

[arthurm73874765]

That's very helpful.
Thank you.