There is a wonderful feature in Photoshop Elements called the Organizer that easily does just that... organizes your photos. You are able to import your photos from your digital camera, card reader, scanner and even your mobile phone. Once the images are imported, you can store information about the photos. By right clicking on the photo, you are given many options to customize this information. For Paint Shop Pro enthusiasts, you can take advantage of their popular Paint Shop Photo Album product to serve a similar purpose.

These choices range from fixing the photo with the Auto Red Eye Fix to many extremely useful organizational tools. We will take a look at the organizational tools. You can create "collections" of photos that you would like to keep together, such as a daughter's birthday party. The way I like to organize my photos is to give them a name that contains pieces of information I might want to sort from. For example, say you wanted to see photos of all of a particular family member's birthdays. You could do a search (Edit/Find/File Name) for their name and the word birthday. If I wanted to find all the photos of my daughter's first birthday, I would do a search for Michaela First Birthday. You can also Tag your photos into different categories, making them a snap to sort into collections. Using the Date View is helpful, as if you know when a photo was taken, you can quickly zero in on it in this manner, too.

These are just a few of the ways I organize my photos with the help of the Organizer. There many more features to explore and make organizing your photos much easier and fool-proof.

Note: it is imperative that you back up your digital photo library often. We recommend backing up to another drive on your home computer network, an external hard drive, or DVD. Hard drives fail often and we hear many heartbreaking stories of customer's losing their photos or digital graphics.