Organizing on a Mac with PSE 4

[emilayohead]

I finally decided to switch from Photoshop 7 to Photoshop Elements 4.0 for a Mac. One of the main reasons I wanted to switch was because I would search for an element/photo in iPhoto (visually or using tags) and then switch to the file browser in 7 to actually locate and open the file, it felt like I was searching twice. So I download Elements yesterday, planning on importing my 3,000+ items into the organizer when lo and behold, the Mac version comes with Bridge, a fancy version of a file browser instead of the organizer!

I've been playing around with it, and it just doesn't seem any better than the method I had previously. I like iPhoto because I can browse visually through all of my kits and such, instead of just looking for a particular item that I plan on using and opening that folder. But I feel like I'm still in for a two-step process.

I'm clearly no expert at this, and there could be a simple solution that I'm just not seeing. How do you organize your photo/elements on a Mac so that you can easily access them in PSE 4?

Thanks in advance for your help - I've been so grouchy all day once I realized that this wasn't going to work the way it was explained in the tutorial.

[Wendy]

Hi ...

... and welcome to the forum :)

The Mac version of Elements has never had the Organiser ... probably because the Organiser originally was PhotoAlbum which was a Widows only application. Also because the Mac came with iPhoto which actually is quite similar to the Organiser then I suspect that Adobe decided the Mac users probably didn't want another photo organiser.

If you go into iPhoto preferences iPhoto>Preferences>General then set double click to open in Elements that will sort out finding things. Or the system I use is to locate the items in iPhoto first and them drag and drop them onto the desktop ...

... I have iPhoto libraries dedicated to Scrapbooking kits which makes like a lot simpler finding things ... to make managing multiple libraries I use iPhoto Buddy:

http://www.iphotobuddy.com/

If you wish then you can use a folder system on your hard disk and use Bridge to manage it ... Bridge is much more than a Filebrowser is has all sorts of features ... here is a link to lots of info about it:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/ss/cs2adobebridge.htm

Wendy

http://www.iphotobuddy.com/