Organize photos: Albums, places, and events

- [Instructor] The Elements Organizer 2018 provides several ways to organize your photos to make them easier to find in the future. In this video, I'll show you how to use Albums, Places, and Events to categorize your photos using each of these options. Now, I'm beginning this video in the Elements Organizer, and I'm currently in the media view. And over here in the upper left corner, I'm going to click on the Albums category. You might already be in the folders, but I'm going to click on Albums to display that, and you can see that right now, I have no albums in this listing here.

So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and create an album. So I'm going to go ahead and select a couple of photos here. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll down a little bit, and we're going to choose some of the photos that we want to use here. So, for example, we have all these sunflower images, okay. Now, the first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to create an album without selecting any images. So I'll click on the plus sign, and I'm going to choose new album, and up here in the album name, I'm going to type sunflowers.

Now, at this point in time, you can see that I can drag and drop media here while I'm creating the album. So if I wanted to, I can come down here and select all of the sunflower images and then just kind of drag them and drop them in there, and now those sunflower images are going to be part of this album. So if I go ahead and click OK, you're going to notice that now, I have a new album called Sunflowers, and if I click on it, you're going to see that it's going to show me all of the sunflower images within there.

Now, what we can do here is we can also add categories to our albums. So, what I can do is I can click on the arrow next to the plus sign, and I can also choose new album category. And so I can create a category for my album if I wish. So maybe what I'm going to do is I'm going to type Flowers and make that a top-level category. So if I click OK, you're going to notice I've now created a category called Flowers, and what I can also do, I'm going to click this again and say new album category, and I'm going to choose Flowers here and create a subcategory for Flowers.

And I'm going to call this Sunflowers, and go in and click OK. And you'll notice that actually right now, the sunflowers is already being used probably as part of my smart tags. So maybe what I'll do is just call this Sunflower, and click OK, and then that allows me to do that. Now, once you've done that, you can either do this as you're creating an album or after the fact. You can right-click on Sunflowers and choose Edit, that's my album, and now I can assign the category of Flowers > Sunflower to this as well.

So, you just have a lot of flexibility. I mean, I could have gone granular. I could have put in there bumblebees, and all these other categories as well. But once you want to commit to this, you can just click OK, and now you can see that I have that category defined here. Now, another way, I'm going to go back to all media, we can also like select a range of photos before we create an album, and now, when we click on the plus sign, it automatically adds them for me. And I'm going to call this album Skateboarding.

And now when we click okay, now we have two albums that have been created. I can click on Sunflowers to view that album and Skateboarding to view that album. Now, I'm going to go back to all media, and let's talk for a second about Places. I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and what I want to do here, you can see here that I have Unpinned locations versus Pinned locations. And you can see in my Pinned locations, I have a few that are listed here, but I'm going to go to Unpinned, and what I want to do is I want to select an image where I know the location is.

So I'm going to come down here, and I'm going to click on this particular image right here. And now what I can do is I can search for a location up here. So I'm going to type up here, Reading, comma, P-A, and I'm going to click the Search button. And it's going to show you the legitimate location that it has found. So I'm going to choose that option, and now it's asking me, do I want to place the selected media at that location? And if I click on the green check mark, and this gets a little tricky here. You might want to zoom in a little bit so that you can see this a little bit better, and now I can click on the green check mark to pin that photo at that location.

And now you can see when I go to the pinned area, that is now appearing on my map. So, let's go ahead and do that again. I'm going to go to the unpinned area, and I'm going to scroll down, and I have some other photos where I want to add the location. And if I scroll down a little bit further here, here, we have some images. These were fun shots here. I'm going to select these images of these old cars, and I'll also include the rope and the chains with that as well. So I'm going to go ahead and select all of them using the Shift key, and then up here in the search field, I'm going to do a search for White, G-A for White, Georgia, and I'll click the search button, and I'm not sure which is the correct zip code here, but I'm just going to choose one of these, and it's asking me, do I want to place the media at that location.

So I'll go ahead and click the green check mark. And now, those photos have been added at that location. Let's do one more here. I'm going to select these images of the mountain that you see here. There's a total of five of them, and up here in the search field, I'm going to do a search for Salt Lake City, Utah, and if I hit Search, there's my option, and I'll click the green check mark to add it. Now, if I go to the pinned area, you're going to see that if I zoom out here, you're going to see that all of those locations that I added are listed on the map, and now you can kind of browse by location.

So if I click on this one here, I can click on the link in the lower right corner, it's going to show me all the media at that location. So, this is a great tool for finding photos based on the location where the photos was taken. Now, I'm going to come up here and click on the Events, and I should also point out that for the Places and Events, you also can use this button down here at the bottom, and I'll do that this time. You can click on Add Event or in the case of Places, when you are in the unpinned area, you can select several photos and choose Add Location.

So you have a couple of choices there. So I'll go back to Events here, and I'm going to go to Suggested, and it's going to kind of show me photos of suggested events that it detected, and it's probably doing this based on date. You can come up here and drag the slider to kind of minimize the groups or maximize them to get a little more granular. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to scroll down to this section here, and I can always click on the Add Event button here.

So maybe what I'll do for the fireworks, I'll click on Add Event, and I'm going to type Fourth of July Celebration. And I know we probably would want to do this on July fourth, but this fireworks display actually happened on the Saturday after. So, that's why that displayed that way. And if you wanted to, you can add a group to this, and you can add a description as well. So I'm just going to go ahead and click OK, and now you can see that event has been added.

So now when I go to the named events, there's my Fourth of July celebration. Now, let's go back to suggested again. I want to do one more here, because these photos here were of my daughter's birthday. So I don't want to include these. These were just kind of fun photos that I had taken along with this. I only want to select these here. And now what I can do is I'll click the Add Event button down here at the bottom to only add the selected photos to the event, and I'm going to call this Claire's 15th Birthday.

And that was on July 30th. I'll go ahead and click OK, and now you can see in the Named category, we now have another event that we can view. So you can see here that each one of these has different benefits that you can utilize to find your photos. If I want to find photos based on location, I'm like, oh, I remember when I went down to Old Car City in Georgia, and I can click on the places, and I can just kind of like move my map and be like, oh, there they are, and I can view those images, or if I want to say, oh, I want to see photos of Claire's birthday, her 15th birthday, I can go to Events, and I can just click on Claire's 15th Birthday, and when I double-click on that, it'll open up that event.

So, really great ways to organize and find your photos using the Elements Organizer. Take a few minutes to organize your photos this way, and it's going to help you to quickly find your photos quickly in the future.