I'm still plugging away at organizing my photos using Organizer. I have duplicates of lots of the photos from when they were transferred from another computer, hard drive or memory cards to this computer. I'm trying to organize the photos on this computer to Pictures then have them in folders by year and month. That way everything coordinates with the views in Organizer and I can make sure where all the photos are.

Currently, most of the duplicates are showing up with a ? and file location unknown. That causes me to have to click on properties of each of the duplicate files and try to find them (the auto search has not been locating them). Is there a setting in Elements6 where it will show the file location with the file name under each thumbnail? If so, could someone please tell me how. Or do you have a better way for me to do this?

Thanks,
Terry

Terry,

Good to see you plugging away at it.

If you are just starting at it, I would suggest that you abandon the organizer - just for a while - and revert to Windows Explorer.

What I have done in the past is to move all the images to a single directory from wherevere they came from, then use the Windows Date Picture Taken Option and sort it on the date picture taken.

Next do a block select of the images shot in say January 2008 and cut/paste them to the 2008 January Folder. I usually set up two side by side explorer windows to do this so you dont have to navigate back and forth to get to it.

This works particularly well if you have primarily JPEGs and not too many PSD, etc files. Also good if not heavy into version sets, etc.

Next open the Organizer, do a Select All, then delete thumbnails (but not from hard disk.)

Then do a Get Pictures from Files and Folders, point it to My Pictures (assuming you stored them under there) and let er rip.

From then on, use the Adobe Downloader and everything will take care of itself.

As I said, this works well if you are just starting off, less so if you have done lots of stuff in Organizer allready. Its suitability depends on your current status.

Terry,

A more specific response to your question is to right click on a thumbnail, show properties. In PSe5 and 4 there is a Windows menu option in Organizer that says Dock Properties in Organize Bin. You can then click on the General Tab (first one) and it will show you where it is.

You can drag out the dock to make it wider and see all of the directory structure.

John,
Where were you when I started organizing this bunch of pictures a few weeks ago? I wish I'd read your first post here before now! That sounds like a great plan for getting organized from the beginning. However, I've already tagged about 2000 of the 8000+ photos. If I revert to that plan, I guess I'll lose all that work, huh?
Terry

Terry,

Not necessarily, at least not based on PSE4/5.

There should be a route of doing a Select all, then File, Write Tag and Property info to Photos.

This makes the tag info stick to the picture itself, especially for JPEG.

You can do a little test on this, shoot a couple of pics, download, tag, select, write tag info, then create a new catalog and import those pictures into it and confirm that the tags have stuck. You can go back to your original catalog, write the tag info and get to it.

The only quirk is that the tags tend to loose their hierarchical structure (if you have set that up) and you have to work at it. Again, I would test this out on another catalog copy to make sure things work out right, then once settled in, you can delete the spare copies you have created.