There are several ways to organize photos on a computer.
Rename your photos by name, date, or event; place your photos in files that have a title that you will remember; or make a contact sheet of every photo you take and where it is.
There is yet another quite simple way to ‘tag’ a photo by name and then search for it according to the ‘tag’ name that you gave it. On a PC when you open your photo files you will see the details of the photo below the folder and there is where you find the ‘tag’ line. You can place a tag on that photo for example Mom 2013. You can also hightlight all those photos, click on ‘tag’ and give them all the same name in one shot. Then, when you go to ‘view’ you can sort by ‘tag’ and all the Mom 2013 will appear in order. The full details of this with photos can be found on this link:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/find-your-photos-faster-how-tags-helped-me-sort-my-snapshots
Find your photos faster
How tags helped me sort my snapshots
Applies to these editions of Windows Vista
Tags are words or phrases that you assign to pictures and other files. Tagging is a great way to identify your files, especially when dealing with digital pictures. I’ve been planning to create a photo slide show for my parents’ upcoming wedding anniversary. Let’s see how tags can make the job easier.
I bought my first digital camera in 2001, and I’ve taken thousands of pictures since then. Most of my pictures have found their way onto my computer with the same obscure file names that the camera assigned to them (for example, DSC00587.JPG), making my Pictures folder resemble a bottomless junk drawer.
My messy Pictures folder
Using my old way, finding the pictures I need for my parents’ slide show would be a chore. Mom and dad are in hundreds of photos, which are spread out in various folders. Even if I had time to reorganize and rename every file, how would I do so in a way that would make sense years from now?
With tags, I don’t have to reorganize or rename anything. To add a tag, I simply opened my Pictures folder, clicked a photo of my mom, and then clicked the area next to Tags in the Details pane at the bottom of the folder window. (If the Details pane isn’t visible, click Organize, click Layout, and then click Details Pane.) In this case, I’ll type the tag “mom” into the Tags box, and then press ENTER.
With tags, there’s no need to reorganize or rename files—just tag them
For my parents’ anniversary slide show, I need to find all of the pictures of my mom and dad. I can tag photos with words like “mom” and “dad”, and maybe “family” or “cat” or “holiday”, and then separate each tag with a semicolon in the Tags box. To tag a bunch of pictures at once, I can select multiple files, and then create tags that apply to all of them.
You can apply tags to many files at once
I spent the rest of the afternoon taking a trip down memory lane, looking at old pictures of my parents, and tagging them whenever a word popped into my head.
Reap what you tag
So now I’ve got a Pictures folder that looks just as messy as it did before, but, under the hood, most of the files now have a few tags. Even though it looks the same on the surface, it’s actually a lot easier to find what I’m looking for. Let’s say I want to see every picture of my son Julian: I open the Pictures folder, and then type “julian” in the Search box. That’s it! Windows automatically searches for the tag “julian” in each file in the Pictures folder, and then displays all of the pictures that have this tag.
To get more specific results, I can select more tags. For example, now I want to see all of the pictures of my son with my mom as well as all of the pictures of my son with my dad. Because I also used the tags “mom” and “dad”, all I need to do is clickTags at the top of the folder window, and then select the check boxes next to “mom” and “dad”. Presto!
Select more tags to get more specific results
Now I can easily find pictures of my mom and dad for that anniversary slide show. To create a slide show in Windows Vista, check out See your pictures as a slide show.
Save searches and avoid headaches
But what about my parents’ next anniversary? I’m sure that I’ll have taken more pictures by then. And I’d love to be able to see all of the pictures together—even the ones that I’m going to take between now and their next anniversary. To make things easier for next time, I decided to build a more comprehensive search across all of my folders, and then save the search so I can use it later.
To do this, I clicked the Start button , and then clicked my user name at the top of the Start menu. (From this folder, a search will bring back results from all of my folders, not just from the Pictures folder.) Next, I typed “mom; dad” in the Searchbox to search for files tagged with “mom” and “dad”. At the top of the folder window, I clicked Save Search, and then clickedSave to finish the job.
Any search in Windows Vista can be saved for later
When next year rolls around, I can double-click Searches in the Navigation pane to find my “mom; dad” search. Clicking this saved search displays all of the pictures on my computer that have been tagged with both “mom” and “dad”—even the pictures that I tagged with “mom” and “dad” after I saved the search.
All of your saved searches are stored in the “Searches” folder in the Navigation pane. There are a lot of other methods for creating and saving searches. To learn more, see Tips for finding files.
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