Photoshop Elements 3 offers lots of great new features and tools to work with. Unfortunately, you may find that its performance isn't always as fast or as smooth as you want it to be.
Luckily, Elements is good at taking care of itself, and there are simple solutions to most of the performance problems you might encounter. In this article, I'll round up some of the most useful hints for getting top performance from Elements and keeping it running happily, including how to run Elements without the Organizer, if you don't want to use Elements to organize your photos.
Some of these tips require you to give up a bit of what the program can do, but in every case there's a workaround. Most people think that an extra mouse click or two is a worthwhile price to pay for a speedier, smoother Elements 3.
The first line of defense when things go wonky in Elements is to clear your preferences. To do that, launch the Editor and immediately grab Ctrl+Alt+Shift. You should see a window asking if you want to delete the Elements settings. You do. If you don't see the window, you weren't fast enough, so quit Elements and try again. This simple step fixes the great majority of things that go wrong in Elements. Whenever Elements starts misbehaving, this is your first troubleshooting procedure, and most of the time it's all you need.
When you install Elements 3, the Adobe Photo Downloader comes along with it, taking over the import of graphics files to your computer, whether Elements is running or not. For some beginners this is fine, but if you're like most experienced computer owners, having this over-zealous little program racing to the forefront every time you plug in a card reader or flash drive (or any removable media, for that matter) can get very annoying.
It's very easy to stop the Downloader. In the Organizer, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Camera or Card Reader, and turn off Use Adobe Photo Downloader. This won't keep you from being able to import photos into the Organizer whenever you want. You just have to wait till the Organizer is open, then go to File -> Get Photos and choose your source. (The Get Photos window is identical to the Photo Downloader, except that photos automatically go into your current catalog--you can't select a different catalog as your destination, if you have more than one.)
If you aren't going to use the Downloader, you might also want to go ahead and follow the steps in the next Tip to help speed up Elements.
The biggest cause of slowness in Elements 3 is in the two services that Elements installs as part of the program. (Services are little programs that run constantly in the background whenever your computer is on.) If you are willing to give up automatic photo downloading, you can make Elements a lot zippier by turning these off. If you've noticed that your CPU usage has been spiking up to 100 percent since you installed Elements, even when it's not open, these are the usual culprits.
To disable the services, go to C:\Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Services. (You may need to switch to Classic View before Services appears.) In the list of Services, look for Photoshop Elements Device Connect and Adobe Active File Monitor.
Device Connect is the source of most problems. It constantly searches for possible incoming photos for the Photo Downloader. As long as you don't need the Downloader to automatically grab every incoming graphics file, you can safely turn off Device Connect. Active File Monitor doesn't cause as many problems, but its only purpose is to run the Watched Folders part of the Organizer. (The Watched Folders feature notifies you whenever photos are placed into a folder that you designate.) If you don't use Watched Folders, you can turn this one off, too.
To turn them off, in the list of services, click the service you want to disable and choose Stop from the list of options to the left of the name. Then go to Action -> Properties and choose Disabled as your Startup type from the pull-down menu in the dialog box that appears. If you change your mind later on, you can restart a service by clicking its name and choosing Start from the list on the left.
You may find that after you install Elements 3, Windows can no longer find any of your letter-named drives except the C drive. If you plug in a flash drive, for instance, you can hear the system alert that it recognizes that the drive has been attached, but you can't see the drive in any list of drives or devices.
If you are lucky, disabling the services as explained in Tip 2 will do it for
you, and your other drives will start showing up again the next time you start
Windows. If that doesn't work, you are in for a session in REGEDIT. In other words,
you have to edit the system Registry. This is serious business and if you don't
understand the Registry and aren't comfortable messing around in there, ask somebody
more experienced to help you out. Go
here for directions on what you need to remove from the Registry to make your
drives visible again. That article is for Photoshop Album 2, but the fix also works
for Photoshop Elements 3.
Editor's note: Logging into Adobe Forums requires registration.
Whether you use the Organizer or not, if you use the Editor's File Browser you may notice that over time Elements starts to lag a little. This happens in all versions of Elements and Photoshop, and in both the Windows and Mac operating systems. The File Browser caches the thumbnails of your photos that it creates, so that it can show them faster next time. Over time, this cache can get very large and start to cause Elements to slow down.
To speed things up again, you just have to empty the thumbnails cache. In the File Browser, go to File -> Purge Entire Cache. This deletes your stored thumbnails and usually gets the Editor back up to speed, although the File Browser itself may be a tad slower the next time you call it up, because it has to recreate the thumbnails.
Another occasional source of Editor slowness is the Elements clipboard, which contains whatever you last copied. If it's a large file, this can make trouble for Elements. (Text from Word, in particular, seems to give Elements indigestion sometimes.) To clear the clipboard, in the Editor, go to Edit -> Clear Clipboard Contents.
Occasionally, you may notice that your Organizer Catalog has suddenly ballooned to a huge size for no apparent reason. This is easily fixed when you're in the Organizer by going to File -> Catalog and clicking the Recover button. As a matter of fact, doing a catalog recover once a month or so can be good preventive maintenance to keep the Organizer happy.
Nobody is neutral about Adobe's decision to include the Organizer as part of Elements 3. It has some wonderful features, but if you already use another program for organizing your photos, or if you just want to be disorganized, you may find it vexing as all getout to have to use the Organizer. The good news is that while you can't install Elements without the Organizer, you can hide it from Elements if you really want to, and run an Editor-only version of Elements.
Don't do this unless you are very sure you are willing to give up the Elements features (like the Picture Package, Contact Sheet, Create Projects, back-up, and so on) that are only available in the Organizer. When you eliminate the Organizer, you eliminate all of the things it handles in Elements, as well. This is a procedure that will leave you with the ability to edit photos in Elements, to find photos with the Editor file browser, and to print a single photo, but that's it, so don't do this unless you are a dedicated Organizer loather, to the point that you'd happily give up a bunch of functions just to make the Organizer go away.
If you are sure you want to go ahead, first quit Elements. Then go to C:\My Documents\My Pictures\Adobe and investigate the contents of that folder and all the sub-folders. Remove anything you want to keep and then delete the Adobe folder from My Pictures.
Next, disable the Adobe services, as explained in Tip 3 above. Then go to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 and find the actual Organizer application file, as shown in the illustration. Rename the file so that Elements won't recognize it the next time it starts up.
Now, in the same folder, find the Editor application file, right-click it, and choose Create Shortcut.
From now on, start Elements from this new shortcut. You'll go straight to the Editor and you shouldn't see the options for version sets in the Save As dialog anymore. To return Elements to its Organized state, quit the program, turn the services back on, and rename the Organizer application file back to its original name. Note that this may or may not work. You may find you need to uninstall and reinstall Elements to get everything working correctly again.
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Related Reading Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual |
Barbara Brundage is the author of Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual, and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual, an Adobe Community Expert, and a member of Adobe’s prerelease groups for Elements 3, 4, 5, and 6.
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