Organizer

[Walter Seaton]

I have recently upgraded from Elements "8" to "12" and am working my way through Steve's excellent book on "12". I have all my still photographs on an external drive and have attached some of them to Organizer. I have discovered that even when that external drive is turned off the thumbnails of the attached images remain in Organizer. What concerns me about this is the hard drive space these thumbnails may take up. They do not appear to be true duplicates (e.g. not as sharp when magnified). Where are these extra images stored and do they take up as much space as the originals?

[Steve Grisetti]

The thumbnails don't take up much space at all, Walter. They're not duplicates of the actual files -- just data about the files.

Even a large Organizer catalog only takes up a few hundred megs of space on your hard drive. Hardly worth being concerned about.

[Bob]

The Organizer builds thumbnails for each image in the catalog and stores them in the Thumbnail Cache which is part of the Organizer's catalog. They are not copies of the images and they are not separate files. Accordingly, they take up far less space than the original image files. The Thumbnail Cache is physically located in the same folder as the other files that collectively make up the catalog.