Install Photoshop Elements 15 (or PSE 2018?) without using Organizer?

mimzoe  wrote Mac OS 10.11.6 PSE 8 I have my own system of organizing my thousands of photos on my iMac. I do not want Adobe to arbitrarily categorize them or assign tags to them. I like to be in charge of that myself.

You are free not to use the organizer, but it will be installed anyway.

You have your own organization? perfect.There are thousands of users which use Lightroom or Bridge plus Elements instead of organizer plus Elements and many more who use only the editor with a simple folder structure. They simply ignore the organizer.

You may use the automatic tagging features only if you want. I don't and manage all my tags, categories, captions, notes, stacks, version sets, project myself. Full control.

Up till now, I have used Image Capture to bring new photos into selected photo folders on my hard drive, then Adobe Bridge CS4 to view the photos and decide which to edit in PSE 8, my current and preferred version because of its simplicity. However, I know it is probably time to upgrade, but I'm reluctant to do so unless there is a way to continue to use my method with PSE 15 and not be forced to use Organizer.

You can still use the latest version of Bridge CC even if you don't have a subscription. No reason to change anything in your workflow.

In addition, I have a very slow DSL connection at this time, and it would be simply impossible to import all my photos into Organizer without hanging up my computer for a very long time. As an example, when I downloaded and installed OS 10.11.6, it took THIRTEEN HOURS. I do see that one can import files and/or folders from the computer one by one, so that might work, but still slowly because of the lousy DSL speed which goes down to about 1.2 Mbps during downloads or even into Kbps sometimes.

Where did you get that idea?

The organizer has nothing to do with the Cloud or Internet. It's a toolkit around a database which creates catalogs on your computer. When you 'Import' (from your camera or one of your drives) the organizer use its own downloader if it's from camera or scanner, then it only scans the files, extracts all the exif information and indexes everything for ultra fast searches and organization. Much faster than Bridge for big libraries and complex multi criteria searches. I understand you have a valid workflow with Bridge and there is no reason for you to change; simply set the organizer preferences, uncheck anything about automatic tagging, and don't check the option to 'save in the organizer' when saving files (that choice is sticky).

My next question is would those file names and tags then be altered by Organizer?

By default, tags, captions and so on are only kept in the database of each catalog. Nothing in the files themselves. You can select files and use the function 'write metadata to files' if you want, so that the tags are available in external tools, Explorer, Bridge...