How to move from Photos to Photoshop Elements

Buying Photoshop Elements 14

Adobe’s Photoshop Elements is an excellent photo-editing program, and it provides far more editing power and creative tools than Apple’s Photos app, or the old iPhoto. Unfortunately, you can’t buy Photoshop Elements 14 on its own from the App Store, as it’s only available as part of a software two-pack along with the Premiere Elements video-editor program. The two programs together cost £110.00, and for some reason the App Store is still selling last year’s version 13, rather than the latest version 14.

The best option is simply to buy Photoshop Elements direct from Adobe instead. This normally costs £79.10 (you can upgrade for £64.81) and also includes a second program called Adobe Organizer that, as the name implies, focuses on helping you to organize your photo library.

You can also buy Photoshop Elements 14 and Premiere Elements 14 together for an upgrade price of £98.16.

Transfer photos from Photos to the Adobe Organizer

The old iPhoto used to have an option that allowed you to store your photos in iPhoto but also to switch into Photoshop Elements when you needed to do some serious editing.

Unfortunately, the newer Photos app for the Mac no longer lets you do that, so you need a way to transfer your photos from the Photos app into the Adobe Organizer.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but the quickest is just to use the Export command found in the File menu within Photos. Select all the photos that you want to copy across, and then select the option marked ‘Export Unmodified Original’

Read iPhoto versus Photoshop Elements comparison review | Apple Aperture vs Adobe Photoshop Lightroom comparison review

How to import photos into Photoshop Elements

That option allows you to copy the full-size original versions of your photos into a folder that you can just leave on the desktop for now. Then you can launch Adobe Organizer and use the Import command found in the top-left corner of the screen.

There are a number of options here – the Import In Bulk command can attempt to import photos directly from Photos itself, but we’ve found that it doesn’t work very well and often leaves you with confusing duplicate versions of many photos.

We’ll use the more straightforward Import From Files And Folders command to import our photos from the folder that we just created.

Sort photos in Adobe Organiser

Once that’s done, Organizer will show all your photos in its main Media view, which just displays all your photos as one long list.

You can use the Sort By menu in the top-left corner to quickly sort photos by name or date, but that’s just the start of the organisation features that you can use here.

Like Photos and iPhoto, the Organizer can sort photos into Events, Places, and People (the latter being Organizer’s equivalent of Faces in iPhoto and Photos). Let’s start with Events, which we can enter simply by clicking the Events tab at the top of the screen.

As you probably know, Photos organizes your photos into Moments, Collections and Years, in order to give you an overview of photos taken at different times. Adobe Organiser works in a similar fashion, although it uses the term ‘Events’ to describe photos that were taken at the same time – just like the old iPhoto used to do. The only slightly confusing thing here is the slider control marked ‘Number of Groups’ that sits at the top of this screen. For some reason this sometimes sets itself to ‘minimum’, which groups together photos taken across very long periods of time. You need to slide it up towards ‘maximum’ – ie maximum detail – to get a clearer view of photos from individual days and months.

Group together photos from different dates

You can also create new Events of your own that group together photos from different dates. If you go on holiday for a week then you can create a single event that covers the entire week, and that will group together all your photos from that holiday even though they would have been shot on seven separate days.

You can also use Command-Click to select multiple photos from completely different dates and then click the Add Event button at the bottom of the screen to combine them into a single event.

You can name these events too, and then just show your favourite events by clicking the Named button at the top of the screen.

Use GPS location data

Like iPhoto, the Organizer has a Places feature that can use GPS location data stored in your photos to display a map showing the locations where your photos were taken.

Organizer uses a handy split-screen display here, showing the map on the right-hand side of the screen and the relevant photos on the left.

If you click any of the markers on the map you can display just the photos taken at that specific location. You can resize the map panel to make it bigger or smaller, or hit the Map button down in the bottom-right corner to hide the map completely.

face-recognition features in Adobe Organizer

The face-recognition features in Organizer have been updated in this latest version, and we reckon they work better than the similar Faces feature in Photos and iPhoto.

When you import photos into Organizer it automatically analyses your photos for you, so you don’t really have to do any work at all. Just click on the People tab at the top of the screen and Organizer will show you all the faces it has spotted, and tell you how many photos it has found containing each person.

All you have to do is double-click on each face to type in the person’s name, or remove a particular photo if it shows the wrong face.

Working with Adobe’s Premiere Elements

One advantage of using Organizer is that it’s also designed to work in conjunction with Adobe’s Premiere Elements video-editor, which means that it can be used to organize and play audio and video files, and even PDF files too.

There are keyboard shortcuts that allow you to show or hide specific types of files, so you could hide all your photos and just quickly browse through some video clips. Organizer can’t detect faces in video, but you can label video clips with people’s names and then do a search for clips containing specific people. You can also add tags and keywords to audio and video clips just as you do with photos.

Adobe Organizer is more than a match for the sorting and organization features found in Photos and iPhoto and, of course, once you’ve imported your photos into Organizer you also have all the editing tools of Photoshop Elements available as well.

You can just right-click on any photo in Organizer to launch Photoshop Elements and get down to work. Photoshop Elements completely outguns the editing tools found in Photos and iPhoto, with a huge selection of filters and special effects that you can experiment with.

It even provides three different editing modes that are designed for beginners, intermediate and advanced users, as well as guides that can introduce you to power-user photographic tools and techniques.