One thing that I have found to be very handy while working with digital images is “tagging”. Tagging an image adds text labels (basic information) inside the image file. Though the tags are not seen on the image, they help search programs “see” the content of the photo by being able to search on a string of characters. The program that I have used almost exclusively since 2006 is the Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 (hereafter, referred to as “DIS”). I recently moved to Vista Ultimate on a new computer and wanted to try the Live Tools that I’d been hearing about, so I downloaded and installed them on my new Vista computer. Although the tag format ends up being a bit different, the tagging is still extremely useful.
When you tag photos, it really eliminates the need to play the “who is that”, “when was that taken”, and “where is that” game over and over again. I inherited what seems like thousands of old images from family members. I’ve spent a lot of time scanning and cataloging photos via filename. Some of the filenames ended up being so long that when I tried to burn them to CD to back them up, the CD burning software told me the filename was too long. Tagging solves that problem by embedding the information inside the image.
In the Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG), tags are easy to create for one image. They are also easy to create for a bunch of images with the same content. If you can fill in a blank or highlight several items and drag-and-drop, you can do this.
To create a single tag for use with a single or multiple images:
Before we get started, notice that there are two tags on the image of the fern already: Textures; wallpaper. They appear under the filename and the rating.
Step 1: under Descriptive Tags, click on “Add a new tag”.
Step 2: enter the word or words you want to create a tag with. The best tags are nouns (person, place, thing). Remember that this word is the one that you can search on. Also, remember that you can add more than one tag per image, so be very generic in your tags (clouds, sun, fern, tree, etc). Once you’ve entered the tag, press [Enter].
Step 3: Apply the tag with “Drag-and-Drop”. Click and hold the left mouse button down on the image (or images) that you want to drag to the tag, Drag the images to the left so that the tag that you want to use is highlighted. Let go of the mouse button. That tag will be applied to all of the images that were dragged to it.
Step 4: Review your image. Notice that when I put my mouse over the image, the image now shows three (3)
tags: Textures; fern; wallpaper.
Searching:
Now that you’ve applied the tag, click on the Start button and type the new tag into the “Start Search” box. The image will show up in the list of results in the Start menu.
Other thoughts:
One of the things that I like about the tagging is that I can sort all of my images by tags and create a timeline of photos about people.
I think one thing that I’d like to see is a Photo/Image screensaver that reads tags instead of looking at just folders of images.
