Windows Vista™ Inside Out

Organizing and Categorizing Your Digital Pictures

The traditional way to organize photos, just like any file in digital format, is by creating a hierarchy of nested folders and subfolders to hold them all. But that system falls apart rapidly when you try to create a subset of pictures that don’t fall into the prearranged hierarchy. If all the pictures from your Hawaiian vacation are in the Hawaii folder and those from your week in Mexico are in the Mexico folder, how do you quickly gather photos of stunning sunsets from both locations?

One useful solution is to tag photos with keywords. Photo viewing programs have been offering the capability to tag or label photos for years, but most suffer from an inherent weakness: the tags are stored in a separate ...