ACDSee Photo Manager has the ability to create your own categories to organize your images.  These categories can relate to your personal photos or to a set of images.  Digital scrapbookers have many images (of paper and elements they use to create layouts) and they use the categories to organize them into each type.     The categories can be found at the top of the Organize Pane.  The categories can be quickly assigned to 1 or more images.   Once assigned, all images in a categories can be quickly retrieved with a click on that category!  You can easily share these categories with other people.  We will share the first way of only sharing the categories and the next blog post will be how to share your images & organizing!

Before we learn how to share, let me show you a collection of categories for digital scrapbookers.  DigiScrapInfo nicknamed them organizing styles because digital scrapbookers had their own approach or style on how they wanted to organize their images.   Take a look at these examples, spread across 3 pages!

• Middle of the Road Organizing Styles
• Long Organizing Styles
• Simple Organizing Styles

These styles have been downloaded thousands of time to kick-start digital scrapbooker’s categories. 

The following method is a way to share the categories but now what images the categories are assigned to.  (This is what the organizing styles are at DigiScrapInfo.)

How to create a file of your categories:

1. Start Photo Manager
2. Select Database | Export | Database (In Pro 3: Tools | Database | Export | Database )
3. Select Next
4. Select Export database information to a text file:
5. Select only Include all category definitions
6. Select Next
7. In the Where do you want to export the data? box, select a folder to save it too
8. In the next box, name your fill.  You do not need to add an extension to the name, it will automatically add .txt.
9. Select Next
10. Select Next
11. Select Finish

This will create a text file that you can email to your family or friend.     The importing of these categories into their photo manager will only add to their existing categories and should not affect their organizing.  Once your family or friend receives the text file.  they basically do the reverse process:

Using a category text file

1. Start Photo Manager
2. Select Database | Import (Pro 3: Tools | Database | Import)
3. Select Next
4. In #1, Select Information from a text file, including any combination of keyword and category definitions and image information
5. In #2, Select where your category text file is saved.
6. It is fine to let it optimize database files after import
7. Select Next
8. Select Next
9. Select Finish
10. Select OK to allow Photo Manager to restart.
11. You should now have the categories that are listed.

Want to share your categories? 

Maybe you have a set of nature categories  like flowers, trees, water, etc.    Take the text file of your categories that you exported, compress it in a zip file, and upload online to some hosting site, and link to it here in a comment.  (Even though the text file is small, I recommend zipping it up so it easier for the user to download.  Browsers have a tendency to show text files and it makes it much more difficult to save it for the user.  The user should always unzip it before they try import the file in.)