12 Great Do-It-Yourself PC Projects

Organize Your Photos

Illustration: Mark Matcho

You can eliminate the hassle of hunting for photos on your PC by doing some up-front work with tags, which let you assign multiple search keywords to photos. For instance, you could tag a photo from your Alaska vacation showing both of your kids with each child's name and "Alaska," and it will then turn up in a search for any one of those tags.

I'll explain how to organize your photos in Windows XP (which is actually pretty lame at the task) and in Vista.

To tag a single photo in XP, right-click it in Windows Explorer, select Properties, Summary, and type the tag name into the Keywords field. When entering more than one tag, separate them with semicolons. You can tag multiple photos at once, but doing so deletes any tags you've previously assigned to them.

In Vista, ignore Windows Explorer and click Start, All Programs, Windows Photo Gallery. This program lists all available tags in the left pane. To make a tag, click Create a New Tag, and then just drag the photos to the appropriate tags.

How do you find photos by their tags? In Windows XP, press <F3> to bring up the search panel (if necessary, click the Back button until the panel says 'What do you want to search for?' at the top). Check Pictures and Photos, click Use advanced search options, enter the tag names in the 'A word or phrase' field, and click Search. In Vista's Photo Gallery, simply select one or more tags to see only the qualifying photos.