Organizer

[Spicelady]

Photoshop Elements 6: I am confused on how to store my photos. What is the difference between Albums and catalogs

for instance, I want to have a place where I store my photos and a place where I store my elements. How do I do this.

[dj_paige]

Your catalog is a collection of all of your photos. The photos are not stored in PSE, rather they remain on your hard disk, and PSE knows where to find them. Also, since you used the plural (catalogs), normally people keep all of their photos in a single catalog (unless there are distinct and non-overlapping purposes to have a 2nd catalog, such as work and home). By keeping all of your photos in a single catalog, you can search across all of your photos, and you can make creations that use all of your photos (you can't do this if you have photos in different catalogs).

An album is usually used for a specific purpose, like creating a slideshow or photobook or other creation. An important difference between albums and your catalog is that in an album you can change the order of your photos. I'm sure others will give you even more ideas about how to use albums.

[MazG]

There are really two kinds of albums.

The regular album where you add photos to it that you've picked out or smart albums which are like saved searches/filters.

I use smart albums quite a bit to do something like:
Show me all photos taken in the last 6 months that are 2 stars or higher.

HTH.

[JonE]

And just to be clear, you put the images into the folders on your computer (or Adobe helps you do this with the loader process). PSE creates the catalog. It is PSE's index of your images. It's just an index or database of the images and titles, tags, size, etc. The images are still where you put them.