Whether it’s getting everyone to squeeze into the frame for just one more picture, or taking a quiet, reflective shot as the sun slips into the sea, you have your digital camera on hand for all of life’s big and little events. The result is a mountain of shots ranging from holiday getaways to a child’s winning kick at a football game, all needing to be categorised and organised for easier viewing, editing and sharing.

Without a good photo filing and retrieval system, digital photos are little better than old-fashioned prints stored in shoe boxes. Enter the Microsoft Digital Image Library 10, the photo organiser included in Microsoft Digital Image Suite. It lets you easily customise how you browse, access and group your photos.

Digital Image Library lets you organise your photos by file name, caption, date, keyword or rating. By using keywords you can easily identify and organise the photos by subject, such as holiday, family or friends. With a single click you can use the Keyword Painter to simply assign the keywords.

As you view your newly acquired photos, New! Flags enable you to quickly designate what you’d like to do next in the editing process: Review, Needs Touchup, To Share and To Print. Keep your edit process moving smoothly with Flags.

Of course, not every photo can be a keeper, and with the 5-Star Photo Rating system you can rate the quality of each photo. Need to free up some disk space? Perhaps it’s time to introduce the half-star shots to the Recycle Bin.

Time spent acquiring photos means you’ll have less time for enhancing and sharing them with family and friends. The Import Pictures Wizard helps you quickly acquire images from your CD, digital camera or removable media, so you can move on to viewing and improving your images.

When it comes to editing, little photos help make for big organization. Seeing multiple thumbnail photos at once in the Thumbnail Pane helps you quickly decide which shots you like best. The Thumbnail Slider lets you zoom in and out to help you search for a particular photo you’d like to find.