David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Keywords/Tags

Keywords, or tags, are descriptive words—like family, vacation, or kids—that you can use to label and categorize your photos, regardless of which album or Event/folder they're in.

The beauty of keywords is that they're searchable. Want to comb through all the photos in your library to find every closeup taken of your children during summer vacation? Instead of browsing through multiple photo albums, just perform a search for photos containing the keywords kids, vacation, closeup, and summer. You'll have the results in seconds.

It may take some time to develop a really good master set of keywords. The idea is to assign labels that are general enough to apply across your entire photo collection, but specific enough to be meaningful when conducting searches.

Here's a general rule of thumb: Use albums to group pictures for specific projects—a book, a slideshow, or a Web page, for example. Use keywords to focus on general characteristics that are likely to appear through your entire photo collection—words like Mom, Dad, Casey, Robin, Family, Friends, Travel, and Vacation.

It also might be useful to apply keywords that describe attributes of the photos themselves, such as Closeup, Landscape, Portrait, and Scenic—or even the names of the people in the photos, like Harold, Chris, and Uncle Bert.

You can apply as many keywords/tags to an individual photo as you like. A picture of your cousin Rachel at a hot dog-eating contest in London might bear all these keywords: Relatives, Travel, ...