We're trying to organize all of our digital photos, going back several years. It's a real pain, trying to figure out how to organize - do we catalog by date, location, event, people in the picture?

Windows Live Photo Gallery, now available for XP and Vista for free, allows you to tag people just like you do on Facebook (but with more flexibility that Facebook, because you decide the size of the square around the person in the photo), and also allows for a caption and miscellaneous tags. Take the picture below, for example, (click to see full size).

With this photo I have:

• tagged several people (names blurred for privacy),
  
• added descriptive tags "180" and "Poland" because it's a trip that the group 180 took to Poland. You'll
• added a caption
• edited the author

The best part of this is that Windows saves this information right into the file. If keep a backup, the information is saved. If I email it to you, you get the tags I've added.

I can now

• search in Windows Gallery for "Dan Alice Poland" to see all pictures where there's a Dan and an Alice in a photo tagged with "Poland"
• upload to Facebook, including all people tags, which will be linked to their Facebook profile if they're my friend on Facebook
• upload to Picasa, including all people tags
• upload to Flickr and other places too.
  

Using Windows, you can find your photos by date, person, description tag, folder, or by searching.

Finally, a decent way of organizing our photos!

(If you're interested, it can even sync your photos between computers, via your hotmail/msn account, so if you edit a photo or add tags, it can make the changes to copies on other computers that you have.)

1 Comment

1. Jen on 6/1/09, 11:13 PM

   I'M SO JEALOUS!!!