From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021
Understanding the Elements Organizer
From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021
Understanding the Elements Organizer
- [Instructor] The Elements organizer is a companion program that comes bundled with both Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. Now, though it also has some tools in it for creating slideshows or for sharing to sites like YouTube or Twitter, its primary purpose is to serve as a file management tool for the media files on your computer. I'll show you what I mean. Now you can launch the organizer one of two ways, either right from the Elements hub, that Welcome screen, or you can go from either Premiere Elements or Photoshop Elements, just go down in the lower left hand corner there and click on the organizer button. Now at the outset, I do want to say that what you're seeing on your screen is going to look nothing like what I see on my screen of course, because mine is based on the media files that are on my computer and here in the media browser which is what that large portion of the screen is, where you can see all those different media files. What the media browser is showing me is audio files photo files, and video files. They're pretty easy to tell which is which. The audio files of course have a little speaker on them. The photo files don't have any indicator on them and the video files have a little play button on them. And if you double click on any video file, you can preview it. And close it by clicking on the button in the upper right hand corner. Now you can turn on and off these little panels on the side hide the panel by clicking on the lower left hand corner, hide the panel or open the panel by clicking on the keyword info button in the lower right hand corner. And these panels include keywords or folders that you can use to filter what is displayed in the media browser. And what is displayed in the media browser is based on metadata. Metadata either that you've added yourself or that has been added automatically by the program. So the program is searching through your media files. It's adding its own little smart tags. In fact if you right click on any video file or photo file and you go down here to Remove Smart Tag, you can see that the program has automatically added a number of keyword tags to the video file just based on its own analysis. You can also add your own keywords by adding them using the panel over on the right, or you can put your video and photo and audio files into little albums. So if I want to see just what I put in my Chocolatiers album I can click on this, my People album, my Restaurants album. And if you want to go back to the main browser again, or to the display of all media files, just go up to the upper left of the media browser and click on all media. Now you can display this media as little thumbnails here. This is the grid view or by going to the View menu and selecting Details, or just by clicking Control + D or Command + D on a Mac. I'll just do that, Control + D. I can see the files along with their names, their ratings, basic information about them the date that they were recorded. If you're not seeing the name of the file that can be toggled on right here under the View menu also. But let's keep it in grid view right now, I'm going to Control + D or Command + D to go back to grid view. There are a number of ways that you can add metadata or filtering data to your files. You can base your filtering on the people in your photos and in your files, the places where they were recorded. And some of this gets pretty precise. You can get it right down to a particular address. If you've got location services turned on on your camcorder or your phone, any video or photos you shoot will automatically have this metadata included and it will automatically be added to the map at a specific location. You can also filter your media files based on the events they commemorated or the dates that they were shot. Let's go back out here to the main browser again. Once all this metadata is in there and a lot of it is happening automatically. A lot of it you're adding yourself. You can easily search through your files by clicking on this little search button in the upper right hand corner. You see, you can search by smart tag, by people, by location and you can use Boolean logic to create filters based on this metadata. So for instance if I wanted pictures that included Jean-Michel. If I wanted those pictures to only be pictures that took place in Santa Barbara, these are pictures of Jean-Michel in Santa Barbara. Include media from my Chocolate Media folder. And that filters out all of my media. I can change these again, using Boolean logic from AND to OR. And now it's showing me video and photos that either include Jean-Michel in Santa Barbara or that were included in my Chocolate Media folder. So it's actually a pretty deep tool for managing your files. And I spend, if you're interested, three chapters in my moviepicks.com guides for Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements going through how to use all the tools in this wonderful little program. But it's a great tool for quickly filtering and locating the video, audio files and still photos on your computer.
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