What is the best way bto organise my photos?

[Peter27952071pv9w]

I've just upgraded from PSE 2018 to 2023 running Win 10 with a catalogue of approx. 50k photos.  My photos are split into 3 types - family and friends, macro and mycology.  What i would like to do is when I'm in organiser, i only view images from one of the above types so that it's very easy to sort through and display images of say the family vs macro images or mycology.  At the moment they are split into folders, so one folder might be a family trip, the next folder a set of macro images and the next a bunch of mushrooms.  Having researched it a bit i can see various solutions:  calaogues, albums, tags etc, but not sure which one is the best to achieve my aims?

Many thanks Pete    

[Greg_S.]

For your purposes, I would suggest using keyword tags.  For your family photos, I would recommend using People tags.  But if you don't want to use face recognition, then you can use keyword tags too.  How do you want to find the Macro photos?  Are they just of mushrooms or other subjects?  Or are you just interested in finding images taken with a particular camera or lens?  For the latter, you can use the Find>By Details (Metadata) to search for such images.

[Peter27952071pv9w]

Hi there,

Many thanks for your reply, I appreciate the time you spent on this.  For my macro images, I just want to get them out of the way so that they don't clutter up the folders view as I have quite a few macro shots, most of which are totally uninteresting to my family!  If these folders could be hidden in some way then it would be easier for others to find the family photos - hence the idea of dumping the macros into a separate catalogue.  With regards to sorting through the macros, tbh, i don't really look at them much as they were an old hobby that i haven't kept up.  I might in the future browse through them, but honestly, mostly they just sit on my hard drive clogging up space.  I don't want to delete them though!  (I do want to go through them and curate the best ones at some time by deleting the out of focus images and bad compositions, but there are thousands of images to sort through so this would take quite a mammoth effort!)

Many thanks

Peter

[Greg_S.]

For the Macro photos, you can select the photos and use Mark as Hidden from the Edit>Visibility menu to hide them from the normal view.  Whenever you want to look at them, you can use the same menu to Show all files or Show Only Hidden Files.

The other option is to tag all the family photos with a Family tag.  If you then check the tag box in the keyword tag panel on the right, only the family photos will be displayed.

Depending on the nature of your Macro shots, you might be surprised to find that Elements 2023 has placed some hidden tags upon them.  So, if you use the Search dialog in the Organizer, and enter mushrooms as a search term, you may get many results without doing anything further.  Of course, you may get some false positives:

[Peter27952071pv9w]

Thanks I'll try these tips and see if how they work out.

Pete