Digital cameras capture images as seen by the magic of CCDs (Charged Coupled Devices).

The electronics inside a camera is not smart enough (yet!) to recognise what is taking a photograph of: a tree, your grandma, a cat, another tree.

As such the file names of images once transferred to your PC are imaginative titles such as "DCP0010.JPG" or "IMG0032.JPG"

Renaming files in Vista is easy. Sometimes there are more people in an image than you have space to type. Or you might wonder if tree should come before cat when typing a name.

Tags to the rescue.

Using Windows Live Photo Gallery, a tag, or selection of tags can be applied to an image. It is sort of like a hidden catalog reference attached to each image you can use later to find the images. Using metadata standards these tags are shared by many programs.

Step 1:

Click on the "Info" button on the left hand side of the toolbar in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

A panel will appear to the left of the screen.

Step 2:

Click on the text "Add tags"

Simply type in the text that details the image. Keep clicking and adding tags.

On the bottom of the Info panel, is the ability to add a caption:

Step 3:

On the right hand side of Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can now twirl down the Tags icon and see any and all of the Tags applied to your images.

By clicking on ferarri, for instance, the images tagged above now appear.

By selecting an image not already tagged, and dragging onto the Ferarri tag; this will automatically apply the tag.

Power of Tags in Windows Vista

Is Tagging images like spending a wet weekend sorting out the shoe boxes underneath your bed? Sort of.

There is a powerful feature in Windows Vista that uses these tags. Saved Search.

Click on the Windows Key, and type F (for find)

Click on the twirl down "Advanced Search". One of the fields you can search by is called Tags. Windows Vista permits each file to have a set of Tags; and the searching will also find inside of Photos where they have been tagged.

[hint: you can just type tag:(tagname) into the search field to achieve the same result]

Once the results are listed, you can save the search - and re-execute the search at any time.

Tagging. Making searching easier.