Automatic folder organization in Photoshop Elements Organizer?

[daica75]

Hi

I have Photoshop Elements 2020, and I am using Organizer.  I have been able to import a lot of my pictures on a hard drive already, and I know there were many duplicates found and in importing photos from different photos, it imported photos from only one folder instead of another.

Is it possible to have Photoshop Elements Organizer reorganize the folder setup so that the picture files only exist once and are in a new folder setup, like by year and month the photo was taken or something like that?

[99jon]

You can bring up the organizer time line. Press Ctrl+L

[MichelBParis]

The organizer strength is to organize in your own virtual organization with hierarchies of keywords, tags, albums, stacks, version sets. It will help you work manually with your folders just like with the Explorer/Finder or browsers like Bridge.

However, an automatic organization (or re-organization ???) of your folders is not directly available.

To achieve your goal, the first thing you might do would be to set your advanced preferences in the organizer so that new 'imported' files from your camera/card reader are automatically downloaded in a folder structure based on date_taken.

You select the master folder (I create one for each new year) and the downloader automatically creates subolders like

"2020 04 05"

 for each day.

There is no available way to re-organize files already in your present folder structure. However, there is a trick.

Let's say you want to import files from one trip or event already stored in an external drive (an not yet in the catalog).

Copy them to a USB thumbstick and Import from the thumbstick with the option 'from camera or card reader'. This will import in the day subfolder structure. If the thumbstick is too low in capacity, import on several batches.

I also want to stress how the downloader deals with duplicates: it imports the first duplicate, then it checks all scanned files to be imported. If the date_taken and the file size in kb is the same as a file already in the catalog or in the download session, the file is skipped. So, you don't import what PSE considers as duplicates, but the choice betwee duplicates is totally random. Files with the same name are not duplicates.