I’m not too familiar with Windows Vista tool for organizing/tagging pictures. If it does categories and tags you’re half way there. I’m not sure if it supports IPTC/XMP fields, which means that the tags you’re creating can be written in the image files themselves. If you can’t do that, all your tags and keywords will not transfer on another operating system or software…you will only see them on your computer. So, in this respect I don’t believe Windows Photo Gallery works the same as Lightroom or ACDSee.

Read this article for an better explanation:
The road frequently travelled by image metadata

Yes…keep doing those backups they are a life saver.

Before, I organized my folders using location based keywords, which seems now to be more appropriate to do with tags. For example, I would make folders like this: Country/Name of State OR City/Place in State Or City. But your way is better. I like it. Thanks.

Now though, I want to tag all those 1000s of pictures! : |

Some of them are already tagged from a long time ago. But, needless to say, many new and untagged pictures have gathered so I need to re haul the whole system. I use Windows Vista Windows Photo Gallery to do the tagging. It came with the computer. I can also make Categories with that Software too. Also I can do batch tagging.

Another thing. I also backed up all those reorganized folders and photos on 7 DVDs. (Cheapest method right now).

My original intent was to move all my original pictures completely off my hard drive (because space is becoming so tight) and then only keep thumbnails or scaled down copies that I can search. This would turn 28 GB into only 1 GB on my PC. Do you know an easy way to do that?

Once again, thanks for your site.

Doesn’t Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista do the same thing?

Your comment made me read that article again and make it more clear…so thanx again. I hope you get to finish organizing your pictures. The more pictures you have the more you need to organize it.

“Up to now, I’ve been talking about XMP metadata relating to the Lightroom develop instructions. You may be wondering about the other metadata, such as keywords, ratings, etc. The same holds true for them. You need to push this data onto an original file if you want it to travel with the file outside of the Lightroom environment. You can do this on an image-by-image (or selection-by-selection) basis from the Library module menu command Metadata?Save Metadata to File. Or you can set your catalog preferences so it’s done automatically to all files and all file types (File?Catalog Settings/Metadata tab, then check Automatically write changes into XMP).”

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2008/01/01/saving-metadata.html

Maybe you could mention this in your post