Find your favorite photos in a flash

Did you know that there is a lot of useful information hidden within the digital picture files stored on your computer? Many of today's digital cameras add this information—called metadata—whenever you take a photo. The information ranges from the date the picture was taken to the type of camera used to take the picture. You can use this information to help you sort and organize the photos in your My Pictures folder—making it easy to find the photo you're looking for.

Here's a typical situation: you're trying to organize a folder you called "travel," but you're not even sure which photos you've saved to this folder.

Let's take a look at how you can use the metadata added to photos to organize your travel folder.

1.	In the travel folder, click Views, and then click Details.
2.	Right-click the column header area to open the column header menu options. Click Camera Model. The camera model used to take each picture will be displayed in the folder, along with the file name, size, and type. By adding the Camera Model column, you can now sort the pictures in this folder based on the cameras used to take them.
3.	Right-click the column header area to open the column header menu options again. This time, click More. The Choose Details dialog box appears.
4.	Scroll down the list of options until you find Date Picture Taken, and select the check box next to it. A green check mark will confirm that you have selected it. Click OK. Now your folder view includes information about when the pictures were taken and the camera model that was used to take them.
5.	Click the Date Picture Taken column header to sort the pictures in chronological order.

The folder, which was filled with a confusing collection of travel photos, now contains photos organized by common data. This data can also help you create new, more appropriately named travel subfolders.

Let's look at some ways you can use metadata to further organize your collection of pictures.

RED BOX (top box): Notice that the photos in this box were all taken on the same date with the same camera. You know that these are from a trip you took to Florida in August 2003, so you can put them into a new folder called "Florida 2003."

BLUE BOX (middle box): These photos were taken on different dates but with the same camera. You recognize one of these photos as a picture your friend Chris sent you, so you move these photos to a new folder called "Chris Travel Pictures."

GREEN BOX (bottom box): These photos were all taken on different dates. With the exception of one picture, they were all taken with the same camera. The photo without camera or date information has a similar file name as the other pictures, and you recognize it as a photo from a trip that your mother took. So you move these photos to a new folder called "Mom Trips."

Once your photos have been moved to their new folders, you can rename them all at once to make them much more recognizable in the future.

As you take more photos and receive others from family and friends, it's easy to lose track of where the photos came from. Now you can use the metadata in your photo files to help you organize your photos, and having well organized folders of photos means you'll be able to find your photos—fast.

Tony Northrup is a writer, Internet engineer, and digital photography enthusiast. Tony has a decade of experience making networks and servers connected to the Internet run smoothly. He has authored and co-authored eight books about using Windows and has written dozens of articles about Internet technologies. When he's not on his deck writing, he toys with home-automation technologies and takes pictures for display in a Web photo album. He lives in the Boston area with his wife Erica and cat Sammy. You can learn more about Tony by visiting his Web site at http://www.northrup.org.

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