Every photo of your granddaughter. Found in seconds.
If you have thousands of family photos spread across years of holidays, birthdays, and everyday moments, finding all the photos of one specific person usually means scrolling through everything and hoping you remember where they are. The Photoshop Elements Organizer has a better way.
Its face recognition feature scans your entire photo library, groups faces it believes belong to the same person, and asks you to confirm the names. Once a person is tagged, you can pull up every photo of them — across every year, every folder, every occasion — in a single click. It is one of the most genuinely useful features in the whole Photoshop Elements package, and most people never discover it.
Opening the People view
Open the Photoshop Elements Organizer (not the Editor — the Organizer is the separate app that manages your photo library). At the top of the screen, click the People tab in the main navigation.
The first time you do this, the Organizer asks whether you want it to scan your photos for faces. Click Yes, start finding people. Depending on how many photos are in your catalog, this initial scan may take a few minutes. You can continue using the Organizer while it runs in the background.
Naming the unnamed stacks
Once the scan is complete, the People view shows two sections: Named (people you have already identified) and Unnamed (stacks of faces the Organizer has grouped together but not yet given a name).
Each unnamed stack is a group of photos the Organizer believes shows the same face. Click on a stack to open it. You will see a row of face thumbnails — the Organizer's best guess at which photos belong together.
At the top of the stack, type a name in the Who is this? field and press Enter. That name is now applied to every photo in the stack.
The Organizer then asks: Is this also [Name]? and shows you additional faces it thinks might be the same person. Click the green tick to confirm a match, or the red X to reject it. Work through the suggestions — the more you confirm and reject, the more accurate the recognition becomes for that person.
How accurate is it?
The face recognition works best when:
- The face is clearly visible and reasonably well-lit
- The person appears in multiple photos (more examples = better matching)
- The photos were taken from a roughly similar angle
It handles ageing remarkably well — it will often group photos of the same child taken years apart. It struggles more with babies (facial features are less distinct), sunglasses, and photos where the face is very small in the frame. You will always see some incorrect suggestions, which is why the confirm/reject step exists.
Do not worry about getting every face perfect in one session. You can return to the Unnamed stack at any time to work through more suggestions, and you can manually tag faces in any individual photo as well.
Tagging faces manually in a photo
To tag a face that the Organizer missed, or to add someone to a photo directly:
- 1Select the photo in the Organizer and open it in the single photo view (double-click the thumbnail).
- 2At the bottom of the screen, click Tag People in this Photo.
- 3The Organizer draws boxes around faces it can see. Click a box, type the person's name, and press Enter.
- 4If a face was missed entirely, click Draw a Face Tag and drag a box manually over the face.
This is also useful for tagging very small faces in a group photo that the automatic scan overlooked.
Finding all photos of one person
Once people are named, click any name in the Named section of the People view. The Organizer instantly shows every photo in your library that contains that person — regardless of when it was taken, which folder it is in, or what it is called.
This is particularly useful for:
- Putting together a slideshow or photo book for someone's birthday or anniversary — you have every photo of them in one place immediately
- Finding a specific portrait you remember taking but cannot locate by date or folder
- Seeing at a glance how many photos you actually have of each family member
Smart Albums for each person
Photoshop Elements can automatically create a Smart Album for each named person. A Smart Album updates itself automatically — any new photo you import and tag with that person's name is added to their album instantly.
Go to Find → Find People for Tagging to run a fresh scan after importing new photos. Any new faces that match an existing named person are suggested for confirmation automatically.
A privacy note
All face recognition in Photoshop Elements runs entirely on your own computer. No photos are uploaded to any server, and no face data is shared anywhere. The recognition is done locally by the Organizer application, so your family photos stay completely private.