Creating a collage in Photoshop

[c073186]

I want to create a collage of pictures in Photoshop and I am running into a minor annoyance: every picture I drag into my work space becomes its own layer. This makes it very annoying to move pictures around, I have about 30 of them, so I cannot even remember which picture goes to which layer. It becomes a guessing game to find the layer to select to actually move the picture. Isn't there any way to either have all the pictures in a single layer or else so that when I click a picture, it automatically selects that layer and allows me to adjust/move it?

 

[MacDawg]

You can NAME your layers to identify the pictures

If you flatten the layers you will not be able to move the individual pics

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[semicharmed]

If you right click above the layer you want to move, the layer names will pop up in the menu; if there's more than one layer, there will be more than one name - but unless you dragged all your pictures into the top left corner and proceeded from there, the list will be significantly shorter than the list of layers in the layers palette.
Also, in the layers palette there should be a (very) small thumbnail of the layer. Should help.
As MacDawg said, if the pictures are all in one layer, you would have to use the selection tool to move an individual picture. And if any pictures overlapped, the underlap would be destroyed.
You might want to look into using InDesign - each picture would be it's own object, and you could click and drag to move them.

 

[Wee Beastie]

if it is a recent version of photoshop (may have been in old versions, but i have no experience with them), select "auto select layer" in the menu bar up top. This will allow you to select a layer by clicking on the object that you would like to move.

 

[stainlessliquid]

cmd+opt+right-click what you want to move to auto switch the layer its on