Rate your favorite photos with Digital Image Library
Published: November 9, 2005
If you want to share the three or four best pictures from your vacation with your family, how would you find them among the hundreds you took?
With digital photography organization software programs like Microsoft Digital Image Library (included with Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006), you can rate your digital photos and use the ratings to quickly find the best pictures when you need them.
Digital Image Library lets you rate pictures with a one star to five star rating system based on your own criteria of what a good, better, or best photo is. For example, if a picture didn't turn out so well but you don't want to delete it, assign it one star. If you love a picture and think it's one of the best you have taken, assign it five stars. Organizing your pictures in this way will change the way you find and share your pictures.
Rating pictures
Rating pictures with Digital Image Library is easy. Just follow these steps:
1. | In Digital Image Library, make sure the Preview pane appears at the bottom of the window. To display the Preview pane, on the View menu, click Preview Pane. 
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2. | Select the picture you want to rate. To rate more than one picture at the same time, hold down the CTRL key, and click each picture. |
3. | In the Preview Pane, click the stars to rate the picture or pictures. 
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Using your ratings
After you rate your pictures, it's easy to go back later and find the best ones.
While viewing a folder of digital photos you have rated in Digital Image Library, click the arrow in the Group By box, and then click Rating.
Digital Image Library will group your rated pictures by the number of stars (from five stars to one star), and it will group the unrated pictures.
If you selected a folder that has other folders in it, all the rated photos will be grouped together. This is helpful because it lets you find your favorite photos in your main photos folder, such as My Pictures, as well as find rated photos in other folders that you might have created in the main folder.
Sharing your top-rated pictures
With your pictures rated it's now easier to share the best ones with family and friends in e-mail.
1. | To send an e-mail message containing your five-star pictures using Digital Image Library, select the five-star rated photos. |
2. | On the toolbar, click Share, and then click Send in E-mail. 
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3. | In the Send in E-mail dialog box, optimize the picture settings for e-mail if you like, and then click Insert in E-mail. 
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4. | In the resulting e-mail message that has the selected photos already attached, type the recipient's e-mail address, a subject, and a message, and then click Send. Sharing photos has never been so easy! |
Using digital photography organization software can have a dramatic effect on how you manage and share your photos. It's not only easier; it's a lot of fun too!
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 | 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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