Chapter 2. creating structure within your catalog

Once you start having fun with your digital camera, the number of photos you need to keep track of balloons quickly. Organizer's catalogs are really databases in disguise. Use your catalog to bring order to the chaos of your photo files.

Digital cameras record lots of information for each file, for example, the date and time you took the photo, the format, a file name. Organizer automatically enters that information into your catalog. You can add other details in captions and notes. To make it possible to sort your photos, you add categories, sub-categories, and tags. Finally, you can gather a set of photos for a specific purpose by creating collections and collection groups.

Categories and tags are Organizer's version of searchable keywords, while collections and collection groups act more like electronic shoe boxes storing groups of photos for use in a project. We'll make one collection group and several collections to gather photos for our album. Once you place photos in a collection, you can put them in any order you like. The collection contains links to your photo files. Photos in a collection still appear in their original catalog. Catalog searches still find these photos, and you can add them to other collections for other projects. Using tags, we'll narrow the range of candidates for our album, then gather the finalists into collections for each set of facing pages.