Section 13.5. Tags and Ratings: All Versions


13.5. Tags and Ratings: All Versions

Tags are descriptive keywordslike family , vacation , or kids that you can use to label and categorize your photos and videos . Ratings are, of course, star ratings from 0 to 5, meaning that you can categorize your pictures by how great they are.

The beauty of tags and ratings is that they're searchable. Want to comb through all the photos in your library to find every closeup taken of your children during summer vacation? Instead of browsing through dozens of folders, just click the tags kids , vacation, closeup , and summer in the Navigation tree . You'll have the results in seconds.

Or want to gather only the cream of the crop into a slideshow or DVD? Let Photo Gallery produce a display of only your five-star photos.

13.5.1. Editing Tags

Microsoft offers you a few sample entries in the Tags list to get you rolling: Landscape, Travel, and so on. But these are intended only as starting points. You can add as many new tag labels as you want to create a meaningful, customized list.

To build your list, you can operate in either of two ways:

  • In the Navigation tree . To add a tag, click "Create a New Tag" in the Navigation tree (Figure 13-13). Type the tag label and click OK.

    Figure 13-13. You can drag thumbnails onto tags one at a time, or you can select the whole batch first, using any of the selection techniques described on page 436 .


  • In the Info pane . Click Info in the toolbar. In the Info pane, click Add Tag.

To edit or delete a tag, right-click it, and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Delete or Rename.


Note: Be careful about renaming tags after you've started using them; the results can be messy. If you've already applied the keyword Fishing to a batch of photos, but later decide to replace it with Romantic in your keyword list, all the Fishing photos automatically inherit the keyword Romantic. Depending on you and your interests, this may not be what you intended.

It may take some time to develop a really good master set of keywords. The idea is to assign labels that are general enough to apply across your entire photo collection, but specific enough to be meaningful when conducting searches.

13.5.2. Applying Tags and Ratings

Photo Gallery offers two methods of applying tags and ratings to your pictures:

  • Method 1: Drag the picture . One way to apply tags to photos is, paradoxically, to apply the photos to the tags .

    That is, drag relevant photos directly onto the tags in the Navigation tree, as shown in Figure 13-13.

    To give a photo a new star rating, drag its thumbnail onto the appropriate row in the Navigation tree.


    Tip: You can apply as many tags to an individual photo as you like. A picture of your cousin Rachel at a hot dog- eating contest in London might bear all these keywords: Relatives, Travel, Food, Humor, and Medical Crises. Later, you'll be able to find that photo no matter which of these categories you're hunting for.

    This method is best when you want to apply a whole bunch of pictures to one or two keywords. It's pretty tedious , however, when you want to apply a lot of different keywords to a single photo. That's why Microsoft has given you a second method, described next .

  • Method 2: Info Pane . Highlight a thumbnail, and then click Info in the toolbar to open the Info panel. Here, you find a simple list of all tags you've applied to this photo. Add a tag by clicking Add Tag, and then typing a tag name (or as much as necessary for Photo Gallery to autocomplete it). To change the photo's rating, click the number of stars you want.

    POWER USERS' CLINIC
    Nested Tags

    Tags, in essence, are a way to place your pictures into categories. And the only thing that could be more useful than that is being able to put them in subcategories .

    Fortunately, you can do exactly that using nested tags . Within the Trips tag, for example, you can have Hawaii, Vermont, and The Zoo.

    To create a sub-tag, just begin a tag's name with a backslash character (\). That's it: you've just created a sub-tag.

    Later, when you're applying a tag to a group of photos in the Info pane, you can specify the subcategory just by typing the backslash and the first part of its name.

    For example, you might type tri , and smile as Photo Gallery's autocomplete feature proposes the rest of the word Trips . Type the \ symbol, and then type ver . Photo Gallery proposes Trips\Vermont; hit Enter to confirm its choice.

    (You can use any sub-tag with any main tag. That is, Family\Vermont is just as legitimate as Trips\Vermont .)


    The beauty of this system is that you can keep the little Info pane open on the screen as you move through your photo collection. Each time you click a photoor, in fact, select a group of themthe tags list updates itself to reflect the tags of whatever is now selected.

    (To remove tag assignments from a certain picture, right-click the name of the tag. From the shortcut menu, choose Remove Tag.)


Tip: You can drag thumbnails onto other Navigation-tree elements, toonot just tags and ratings. For example, you can drag them onto a different month or year to change their internal records of when they were taken. You can also drag them onto folders in the Folder list to sort them into different folders. (Yes, you can actually move them around the hard drive this way.)

13.5.3. Using Tags and Ratings

The big payoff for your diligence arrives when you need to get your hands on a specific set of photos, because Photo Gallery lets you isolate them with one quick click.

To round up all the photos with, say, the Kids tag, just click Kids in the Navigation tree at the left side of the window. Photo Gallery immediately rounds up all photos labeled with that tag, displays them in the photo-viewing area, and hides all others. Or, to find all your five-star photos, click the row of five stars in the Navigation tree.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT
When Good Tags Go Bad

When you drag some photos onto a tag in Photo Gallery, they seem to take on that tag instantaneously.

That speed, however, is a fakeouta cosmetic trick. Behind the scenes, it takes Windows quite awhile to make changes to your files, because it's actually saving each entire photo file , all 5 or 8 or 13 megapixels of it, back onto the hard drive. If you tag a bunch of photos all at once, that saving process is anything but instantaneous.

While the saving process is going on, a little blue pencil-on-paper indicator appears in the lower-left corner of the Photo Gallery window. If you point to it without clicking, a tooltip lets you know how many more files Vista has to process. Until the blue icon disappears entirelymeaning that the job is donethe tags you apply in Photo Gallery might not appear in Explorer windows and other programs.

What Vista is saving is metadata: generally hidden text tags that hold all kinds of information about each file. Some file formats, however, aren't capable of storing this extra layer of dataand unfortunately , several of them are picture and movie formats that you'd think would be natural candidates for this kind of information.

For example, Windows can't embed metadata (and therefore tags or star ratings) to BMP, PNG, GIF, and MPEG files. Actually, you can apply such identifying information to those file types in Photo Gallery , but it won't show up in Explorer windows or anywhere else in Windows (like the Photo Viewer program).

You also won't be able to apply Windows-wide metadata to files that are locked, in use by another program, or corrupted.


More tips:

  • To find photos that match multiple keywords, Ctrl-click additional tag labels. For example, if you click Travel, and then Ctrl-click Holidays, Photo Gallery reveals all the pictures that have either of those keywords. (There's no way to perform an "and" keyword roundupthat is, to find pictures that have both Travel and Holidays tags.)

  • You can also Ctrl-click unrelated branches of the Navigation tree. For example, you can click the Casey tag, and then Ctrl-click the five-star rating row, to find only the very best pictures of Casey. You could then even Ctrl-click "2006" in the Navigation tree to further restrict the photos you're seeing.

    But why stop there? Ctrl-click Videos at the top of the Navigation tree, and now you're seeing only the five-star videos of Casey in 2006.

  • If you click tag heading (like "Trips"), Photo Gallery automatically selects all of the subheading tags ("Vermont," "Hawaii"). If you don't want to select the sub-tags, right -click the top-level tag; from the shortcut menu, choose "Select top-level tag."

  • You can drag tags up or down in the Navigation tree (to rearrange them) or even left and right (to turn them into sub-headings within a main tag). As the tag list grows, remember that you can collapse any branch of the tree by clicking its flippy triangle.

Figure 13-14. As you type into the Search box, Photo Gallery hides all pictures except the ones that have your typed phrase somewhere in their names, captions, file names , or folder paths. (To cancel your search and reveal all the pictures again, click the tiny X at the right end of the Search box.)


13.5.4. Searching for Photos by Text

The tag mechanism described above is an adequate way to add textual descriptions to your pictures, but there are other ways. The name you give a picture might be significant, and so might the picture's caption or its folder location (that is, its folder path ) .

The Search box at the top of Photo Gallery searches all of these text tidbits. It works essentially like the Start menu's Search box:

  • Just start typing. As you type, you filter the thumbnails down to just the pictures that match what you've typed so far. You don't have to finish a word, press Enter, or use wildcard characters (*).

  • You can type two words (or parts of words) to find pictures that match both. To find all photos of Zelda in Brazil, typing zel br will probably do the trick.

  • Only beginnings of words count. Typing llweg won't find pictures of Renee Zellweger, but zell will.




Windows Vista. The Missing Manual
Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
ISBN: 0596528272
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 284
Authors: David Pogue

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