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Digital cameras let you take pictures with impunity. You no longer have to buy film, think in terms of 24-exposure photo sessions, or pay to process any of the crummy shots lurking in your camera. That probably means you've started taking more photos than ever before. You shoot the same scene from three different angles, take extra "insurance" photos of special situations, and generally get a lot more creative than you did with your film camera.

That's great, but all this photography has a downside: Your hard drive probably looks like a digital version of the back of your garage. It's filled with hundreds--perhaps thousands--of photos. Some are titled, but many others still say stuff like DSC030256.jpg. Some of them live in logically named folders; others are strewn all over the place, virtually impossible to find.

Here are ten tips that will help you thoroughly organize your digital photo collection. So the next time Uncle Ned asks you for a picture from his cat's 2001 birthday party, you'll be able to find it in seconds.

1. Let's See--Was It DSC044653 or DSC044654?

Nothing--and we mean nothing--will help you get organized faster than simply renaming your photos. When you download images from your digital camera to the PC, they usually come with file names that only an alien's mother could love. As soon as you move a set of images to the PC, right-click the first file, choose Rename, give it a meaningful name, and do the same for the rest. Later, you'll be able to search for that file by part of the name.

If you have a lot of pictures to rename at once, it can get tedious. You might want to try batch-renaming--a way to give files new names in bulk, instead of one at a time (see Save Time With the Batch Tool, below).

Try this once your picture files are renamed for easy searching: If your system runs Windows XP, click Start, Search, choose the Pictures, music, or video option, and enter the word cat in the 'All or part of the file name' box. Windows will display thumbnail images of every picture on your hard drive that includes the term cat in the title.

If you have Windows 2000, Me, or 98, you can't drill down to search images as easily. You'll have to do things the old-fashioned way. Click Start, Search, For Files or Folders (Me) or Start, Find, Files or Folders (98). In the field that appears under 'Search for files or folders named' (Me) or 'Named' (98), type *cat* (note the asterisks before and after the search term). Of course, your search results could include other files, like your Word and text files, with the word cat in the title. If you know the file extension, you could add, say, .jpg to the search term. If you don't, you can type in all possible graphics file extensions, separated by commas and with the search term in front of each of them, as in *cat*.jpg, *cat*.bmp, *cat*.gif, *cat*.tif.

But make sure you rename your pictures right away. If you procrastinate, you'll end up with hundreds of images to rename, and it'll never get done.

2. Save Time With the Batch Tool

If you're in a hurry but want to label your photos before you forget, you can rename them all in a single batch if your system runs Windows XP. Select the images, right-click, and choose Rename. Type a new name for the images and press Enter.Windows renames all the selected files, but also attaches a different number at the end of each name to tell them apart. What good is that? If you don't have time to rename every image, at least you can name them all after the trip you just took (like "Yellowstone") so they'll be easy to find when you do get around to renaming or editing them.

If you have an earlier version of Windows, you can still perform batch operations on photos, but you'll need a specialized program like ACDSee from ACDSystems (free trial, $50 to buy) or Jasc's Image Robot (free trial, $90 to buy). Both programs let you make the same changes to a large batch of photos, so you can go off and do something else while your PC toils without you. Other image editors also offer this feature, such as the full version of Adobe Photoshop ($609).

3. Rotate the Easy Way

Even simple stuff like rotating pictures sideways can be a pain if you have a lot of photos. Windows XP makes it a snap to rotate many pictures at once through a technique called batch processing. Here's how: In Windows XP, open a folder that includes some digital images and select several of them. (To select photos that aren't adjacent to each other, click each photo while holding down the Ctrl key.) Now right-click the selected images, and you should see the option to rotate them clockwise or counterclockwise. Choose one, and Windows will do the rest.

Windows 2000, Me, and 98 don't offer the batch-rotation trick, but you can rotate your photos in an image-editing program, such as Jasc's Paint Shop Pro ($109) or Adobe Photoshop Elements (free trial, $99 to buy). In Paint Shop Pro, click Image, Rotate; in Photoshop Elements, select Image, Rotate Canvas, then choose 90° CW or 90° CCW.

4. Be Ruthless: Delete the Trash

When it comes to digital photos, we all become terrible packrats, saving pictures of people without heads and images that contain ghostlike blurs that we suspect might be someone's toddler from back in the Ronald Reagan era. If you want your digital photo collection to be useful, though, you need to mercilessly discard the terrible shots--all those that appear out of focus and just poorly composed.

If you have half a dozen photos of your cousin's new home, pick the best two and throw away the rest. If you're honest with yourself, you'll agree that your photo collection is more useful, easier to search, and less intimidating to maintain if it's pared down to a reasonable size.

5. Organize Your Life With Folders

Windows gives you a great place to store your pictures--a folder that's actually called My Pictures. However, packing thousands of images into one big folder is a lot like storing several years' worth of tax receipts in a single size-11 shoebox.

There's an easier way: Open My Pictures and right-click anywhere on the folder background. Choose New, Folder and give it a name appropriate for your current batch of photos. Make as many folders as you need (you can make folders within a folder) and drag your photos (and folders) around into logical places. If you file your photos by criteria like year, event, subject, and topic, they'll be extremely easy to find anytime you need them.

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