There's a hidden gem inside the Photoshop Elements Organizer. Searching for one specific item you have among hundreds and thousands of items is possible!

All about the Search Box

The Search box in the top right of the Photoshop Elements Organizer was first implemented in the Photoshop Elements 11 and is now in the newer editions.

You can type a simple keyword or filename in the box, or use it to create advanced searches.

How to do an Advanced Search in the Search Box

You can use keywords and tags in the Search box to create an advanced search easily and quickly.

Using "filename:" searches the items with the word flower.

Using "tag:..." searches files that are tagged with flower.

You can even use a Boolean style search, where you use AND, OR and NOT to create a more advanced search.

filename:flower not tag:flower

This search returns what have "flower" in their filename but are not tagged "flower".

This is handy to find untagged items.

Search Criteria for the Search Box

You can search by:

• Folder:
• Date:
• Tag:
• Filename:
• Caption:
• Make:
• Model:
• Author:
• Notes:
• People:
• Places:

All by typing in the from the search box.

For example, here I've searched tag:flower and folder:flergs to return all the flowers I have in my huge collection of Studio Flergs supplies.

Why and How to tag Multiple Items at Once

Tagging allows more flexible advanced searching in PSE Organizer. But there's nothing worse than scrolling through all your supplies and tags items one or two at a time.

Click and drag across the items while holding down the CTRL Key to select more than one item.

The first option is to enter a word in the Image Tag box to tag the selected items.

Or you can drag a pre-made tag onto the selected items.

Searching using Metadata in the Organizer

Another search feature that I use daily is the Metadata search.

Go to Find>By Details Metadata...

And you can also search for items using different details.

Just click on the + (plus sign) to add more criteria for PSE to search.

Search using Tags in PSE Organizer 12

Photoshop Elements 12 has a different method of searching from PSE6-10 and 13 onwards. To see the current tag searching methods, watch this video.

Searching by Tags can be activated by clicking on the Tags button on the bottom right.

If you can to see any collapsed keyword tags, click on the > (greater than symbol) of a tag.

Then just click on the box of the corresponding detail you want to search under.

There's so many ways to search in Photoshop Elements Organizer. I hope you learnt something new today!

Happy Organizing