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Get Organized by Tagging Your Photos
Tagging Tips

By Sue Chastain, About.com Guide

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Just a few more points about tags and tagging:

If you bought Elements mainly for the photo editing features and you don't think you need tags for organization, I strongly urge you to give them a try. Tags are so much more versatile than folders, and they allow you to browse your photo collection without drilling down through a hierarchy of folders or having to remember if you put something under the "birthday" or "Joe" folder.

When you're just getting started, the tagging process can seem overwhelming, but it is so worth it. Don't over-do it though. Give your mouse arm a rest, and try to tackle it just an hour or two a day. You'll be done before you know it! From then on, it only takes a few minutes to tag new photos as you import them.

You can edit a tag anytime and all the photos with that tag will be updated.

You can convert a subcategory to a tag and vice-versa.

You can move tags from one category (or subcategory) to another by drag & drop--right in the tags palette.

You don't need tags for media types (for instance, video clips) because there is a built-in Find > By Media Type command.

You don't need to refer to dates with tags because dates are handled automatically by the organizer. So you if have a child named Joe and you are tagging photos from his 5th birthday party, you don't need to create a "Joe's 5th birthday party" tag. Instead you could tag them all with "Birthday" and "Party" and use the dates to determine his age. However, you might want to take your favorite pictures from Joe's 5th birthday party, and put those into a collection.

You can manually put your tags in a custom order, but first you must change the preferences for Tags and Collections (under Edit > Preferences > Tags and Collections).

If you have a lot of tags and want to be able to see more on the screen at a time, you might want to change the tag display to names only (under Edit > Preferences > Tags and Collections). If you do this, it is helpful to choose a custom color for each category.

When tags display an icon, you can customize the icon for each tag. By default, Elements uses the first photo that gets that tag, but you can right click on the tag and choose edit, then edit icon. Click "Find..." to pick a photo, then drag the cropping marquee into place on the photo to define the area for the icon.

If you lose your place while tagging, you can always go to Find > Untagged Items.

When you export or email photos, the tags are embedded within the file, so avoid using descriptions you wouldn't want someone else to see. You wouldn't want to tag a friend's husband as "The Jerk" and then send a photo with that tag to your friend! :-)

In thumbnails view, only category icons are shown, but double-clicking to single photo view shows you all the tags that have been applied.

Elements will warn you if you create duplicate tag names, but it's perfectly okay to do and it will know the difference between "People > Chastain > Russell" and "People > Smith > Russell."

Most importantly, don't stress out too much about tag names and hierarchies. Anything you do can be edited and re-arranged later. The more you work with your photos, better refined your tagging scheme will become. My tag palette looks nothing like it did even one year ago. For example, when Florida got hit by the hurricanes in 2004, I initially created a sub-category for hurricanes and two separate tags for Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne. Later, I realized I could condense this down to a single tag for Hurricanes because they occurred on different dates. I didn't want to forget which hurricane occurred when, though, so I used the notes section of the Edit Tag dialog to enter this information. I also entered it in the Date View of Organizer.

There's a lot more I could say about tagging, but you'll learn best by experimenting with it. I'll leave you to it with one more tip that can really give you a great head start if you've been using descriptive folder names to categorize your photos up to this point: Generate Instant Tags from Folder Names

Homework

Your homework assignments (if you choose to accept them) for week 1 are:

1. Spend at least a half an hour each day, or 3 hours for the week, getting your photo collection tagged.
2. Memorize these useful keyboard shortcuts for working in the photo browser:

Ctrl-A -- Select All
Double click thumbnail -- Single/thumbnail toggle
F11 -- Photo Review
Alt-Enter -- Show/Hide Properties Palette
Ctrl-D -- show/hide details
Ctrl +/- -- increase/decrease thumbnail columns
Alt-F1 -- Attach Favorite Tag
Ctrl-1 through 5 -- Rate favorite photos 1-5
Alt-F2 -- Attach Hidden Tag (the photo is still in your catalog, but will not be shown unless you specifically ask for hidden pictures)