Many digital cameras come with free software for organizing and editing your photographs. That software is fine for casual users, but if you are a photo hobbyist advanced enough to, say, read a photo blog, then it’s best to invest in Adobe Photoshop Elements™. Elements was upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0 last year, so you know it is a mature product. It comprises an organizer for filing and retrieving images and a photo editor for improving them. The basics are well-covered at this point, but I have some suggestions for improvements. These range from searching caption text to improved methods of resizing images, tagging, and making panoramas.

At the top of my list for Elements version 8.0 or 9.0 is getting rid of the annoying advertisements that pester you to buy additional services from Adobe. When the program is started, you are always treated to a banner ad. Other ads pop up when you are using the program, but those can be turned off. I understand that some users will want to spend $50 a year for Adobe’s premium service, but that should be in a separate tab that can be selected by interested users.

With that said, here is my list of technical improvements:

1. Provide a capability to search the Organizer for words in the captions. Now keywords have to be defined as tags, and they are put in a list. Words are selected for searching by clicking on boxes next to the listed words. This can lead to a very long list with lots of time spent scrolling through the list. By searching captions, I would not have to define a tag for “Sherwill avocados” and place it in some hierarchy like Hawaii>fruits and vegetables>avocados>sherwill to find the five pictures of Sherwills I have. I could just type Sherwill into a search field.

2. Provide a built-in feature for incrementally sharpening an image and reducing it. The technique is described in one of the QSA tutorials. I claim that this is theoretically the correct way to do image size reduction, but even without the claim of theoretical righteousness, most people will like the results better. Actually, clever programming can produce the same result in one step.

3. Implement spherical projection panoramic merging. If you pivot the camera around one point, all the pictures you take would glue together seamlessly on the surface of a sphere centered at that point. That can be done mathematically by putting the individual pictures into spherical coordinates before merging them. There is math trick to facilitate this using the six faces of a cube for intermediate storage of what’s on the sphere. The user need not know of any of the math trickery, he will just know that merging works much better. Since there are few spherical rooms for displaying the output, the final step is to map back to a cylinder or plane.

4. Recognize the GPS position data embedded in jpgs by Nikon and others. Now, the GPS coordinates must be recovered with separate software, Nikon software for Nikon cameras, for example. The transfer from Nikon into Organizer must be done manually. Organizer should read in the coordinates, use them to automatically look up the locations using a map service, and the add the location to the picture metadata. For example, the GPS coordinates could be processed to yield “on Kearny Street, two blocks north of Montgomery in San Francisco, California” or “in Big Trees State Park 14.5 miles northeast of Arnold, California.”

Organizer now has a feature that allows a map to be pinned with locations of place names that you enter manually. That feature has not worked reliable in my use of it, but it is barking up the right tree.

5. When a photomerge™ panorama is constructed, the default should be to add the tags for the input photos to the output panoramic image. For example, if one photo is tagged birds and snowy egret and the other photo is tagged Everglades National Park.” then the panorama of the two should be tagged with _birds, snowy egret, Everglades National Park. Currently the panorama receives no tags. Moreover, if you have just downloaded a set of images from your camera and make a panorama from some of them, the new image does not appear in the Organizer window with the downloaded set, it is stored back in the main file. To add the tags you must Show All and then hunt for them.

6. There should be a link to post photos on Facebook and flckr. This can be done using the data in cookies stored on your computer. Many sites have a feature that allows cross-posting to Facebook. Adobe’s video editing software, Premiere Elements, has a feature to post videos to YouTube, so the concept is established.

Several of my suggestions, resizing and using spherical projection panoramas in particular, require a lot of computer power. They would have been good ideas all along, but probably not practical before present technology. The user need not be more expert. He will get better results with the same, or few, clicks, never mind that the gnomes behind the screen will really be hustling.