The Hidden Tag
The Hidden tag is one of the built-in tags of Photoshop Elements Organizer. When you tag a picture as hidden, it will never be shown, unless you specifically ask for hidden photos. I receive a lot of photos from family members, and I often use the hidden tag for these pictures. I have a Category for "Other people's pictures" and under that category, I have tags for each of the people I receive photos from. Whenever I get pictures from someone, I add them to Organizer, tag them according to who I got them from, and then go though them and tag all those that aren't of high interest to me with the hidden tag.Now when I perform a search on the "Mom's pics" tag, for example, I'll only see my Mom's pictures that are of high interest to me. When I want to see all of Mom's pictures, I must click the search box next to the "Mom's Pics" tag and the search box next to the hidden tag. Then I can be sure I am seeing all of her pictures.
You can tell if you have any hidden photos by looking at the status bar when there is no active search. If the status bar lists a number of items not shown, those are the hidden items.
Photo Stacks
Photo stacks are another way to hide photos in the photo browser, but it's used primarily for grouping similar photos so they don't occupy so many thumbnail spaces when browsing your pictures. Most people with a digital camera have taken multiple shots of the same scene--trying to get the right camera settings, experimenting with different effects, or just trying to capture the perfect expression on a person's face. This is exactly what photo stacks were created for! Avoid any temptation to use stacks on photos that aren't similar in content--if you do, you will likely have a hard time finding them again.- Unstacking removes the stack but leaves all of the photos in your catalog.
- Flattening removes all but the top photo from your catalog, giving you the option to delete from hard disk if desired.
Illustrated Tutorial for Working with Stacks
Important points about stacks:
- Tag photos before stacking. If you don't, only the top photo in a stack becomes tagged.
- If you drag a collection icon onto a stack, only the top photo is added to the collection.
- If you reveal the photos in a stack and then add all or some of them to a collection, they will not be shown in a stack when the collection is viewed, but the stack icon will be shown in the corner to indicate that it's part of a stack.
- If you select a stack and invoke the File > Move command, only the top photo will be moved. To move the entire stack, you must first reveal the photos in the stack, select them all, and then move them. The same goes for renaming and editing dates for stacks.
- Organizer counts an entire stack of photos as a single item. I know of no way to get a count of stacked photos that are not shown. So, if you use stacks, there's no way to get an accurate count of the number of photos in your catalog.
- Stacks work best when you're not going to be working with anything other than the top photo in the stack. I tend not to stack recent photos. After some time, when I'm confident I won't be working with them very much, then I go ahead and stack the similar ones.
