Stacking and tagging problem

[Christian Jessen]

Hi, folks:)

I am confused about how to select tagged picture files that are "buried" inside a stack of pictures.

Example: One of my tags is called RITA (this is helpful, since it happens to be my wife's name). In the catalog I have a number of stacks and in some cases several pictures inside a stack have been assigned the RITA tag. What bothers me is this: If I select RITA pictures not only do I find the RITA pictures buried in the stack - I also find all the other picures in the stack displayed, regardless of whether I have collapsed or expanded stacks.

[johnrellis]

This is an unfortunate design misfeature of the Organizer that many people have complained about:

http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Searches_are_showing (http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_Searches_are_showing)

The PSE product manager even participated in a thread on the Adobe user-to-user forums about this, asking for details (but he didn't express an opinion about whether Adobe would fix the feature).

The impact of this misfeature is greater when people use stacks in ways that weren't intended by Adobe. It appears that you are putting photos with different subject content in the same stack, whereas Adobe intended stacks to contain photos that are visually similar, with one "best" photo on top. Here's what the User Guide says about stacks on page 112:
You can create stacks to group a set of visually similar photos together, making them easy to manage. Stacks are useful for keeping multiple photos of the same subject in one place, and they reduce clutter in the Photo Browser. When you search for photos, the top photo in a stack appears with the stack icon .
For example, create a stack to group together multiple photos of your family taken with the same pose; or, for example, photos taken at a sports event using your camera’s burst mode or auto-bracket feature. Generally, when you take photos this way, you end up with many similar variations of the same photo, but only really want the best one to appear in the Photo Browser. Stacking the photos lets you easily access them all in one place instead of scattered across rows of thumbnails.
You may find the Organizer a little easier to use if you use stacks the way Adobe intended. If you have a bunch of photos with related content that aren’t visually similar with identical subjects, I suggest using tags to group and organize them. E.g. instead of putting all the photos for a wedding into a stack, tag them with an Event tag created for the wedding.

[Christian Jessen]

Thanks a lot ! This is a good example of RTFM. I should have done my homework. Will try harder next time.

[johnrellis]

This is a good example of RTFM.
With the ideal application, you shouldn't have to read the manual -- the application just "leads" you to do the right thing. Regardless, this still doesn't excuse Adobe's bad design of tag search.