[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Organize Your Photos here

[ktfenn2007]

Just recently I found that you can tag pictures with Google's Picasa 2, which is available for free. It isn't a very user friendly interface yet like Adobe Elements where you can drag and drop the tags, but it still writes to the metadata. It's called Keywords and can be used by either going to View | Keywords or by using the CTRL K key combo. Unfortunately you have to keep typing in the keywords each time, but I've read that better "tagging" features are planned for future Picasa releases.

[ktfenn2007]

Also found that Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 is also free and has the same tagging features as Photoshop Elements (ability to drag and drop tags, etc). Until Picasa's interface is improved, Photoshop Album is definitely the best way to go for free.

[DGittins]

I use Microsoft Digital Image Suite (DIS) and I love the "labels" feature where you can add keywords to images. All my pictures have been labeled accordingly. DIS also has a nice feature that quickly renames photos using dates and such, and I have seen other utilities that can also do this. However, none of the programs I've seen let you rename the photos using the Keyword information. That is, if the picture has keywords such as "Bob;Mary;Mexico", there should be a way to rename the photo(s) using "<Date>Bob;Mary;Mexico.JPG". Make sense? Any ideas how to do this?

[ebloch]

This one costs some moeny but is a great time saver if you organize your pics into folders by date taken:
http://www.styopkin.com/automaticphotosorter.html

[Adama]

Hi DGittins,


I use the regular Windows Picture folder that came with my computer (I have Vista Home premium.) I can rename my pics any time I want.

I just click once on the thumbnail, and then right-click on it which gives me a menu, towards the bottom then I click on Rename. That lets you rename your picture. However, I do not use < nor > nor ; nor any other symbols, except for a comma, because those are usually used by IT people for programming.

I do however, name my pictures something that will remind me who/what/why I got the pic., separating then with a comma: Something like 4Aurora,herL,redtext,new That tells me I grabbed that pic for my friend Aurora, that it is something for her, what the text is and if it says new, then it's probably the latest and the final product.

When I'm in the process of making my graphics (which could take several tries) I may name it 4Aurora,herL,test01 and so on. Because of that, I can always find my pictures whenever I need them.