[kitkat]

I have recently migrated from PhotoShop Elements to the full-fledged PhotoShop CS5.

One of the features of PSE that I liked was the Organizer, where I could save images in dated folders and tag the images with subject information. So if I needed to find an image I took of an airplane I could easily display only the airplane images.

Moving on to PS I don’t see that I have an organizer function, and I do not think it very helpful that in finding images if I store them in dated folders – good for archiving, not good for finding.

I have tried to keep the downloading and organization in PSE, but the function to choose to edit in PS does not work reliably – at the moment it does not work at all.

If I forget about PSE, what are my options with PS CS5 to download and organize images?

[Just1MoreDave]

What Adobe provides with CS5 is Bridge (and Mini-Bridge). The Organizer in Elements stored your images in a catalog, and you normally import them into the catalog first, but Bridge skips all that. It's more like a file browser with some handy additions for looking at images.

Bridge should install right along with Photoshop CS5. It has an icon within Photoshop, a folder with "Br" on it that turns orange when you hover over it. Mini-Bridge's icon is similar except says "Mb". The way it looks can be modified just like Photoshop, and it comes with several different workspaces with names like ESSENTIALS, FILMSTRIP, etc.

What you want to do first is open Organizer, click on File, then Write Keyword Tag and Properties info to Photos. That information is what you've been sorting your photos with, and it's in the catalog, but not attached to each image. When that's done, Bridge can see the same information in a photo's "Metadata". Then you might be able to use Bridge to sort the photos in the same way, if you can figure out which metadata fields the Organizer used for that data. I've never done that - I do use the metadata to sort by lenses, ISO, and other standard EXIF stuff. That's done with the filter tab.

I got the Organizer to load Photoshop CS5 but in a clunky way. This is Elements 6.0. In the Organizer, I clicked on Edit, then Preferences, then Editing, then navigated to the Photoshop.exe file and clicked on Open. The dialog box claims that will add a supplementary editing application to the Edit menu. Well, to get to it, I have to click on Fix, then More options at the bottom, then choose it there. In my experience, this is the typical Elements attention to detail.

[KxBlaze]

Bridge is a great program to organize your photos, especially if you have 1000s of photos. There are many options in bridge so I would suggest searching for some on-line tutorials. Goodluck.