Use folders, tags, and easy-to-use services to search through hundreds or thousands of photos on your computer.
If you're like me, you have thousands of photos—maybe tens of thousands—in your personal collection on your PC. This makes finding the right photo a real challenge. However, you can make it easier with a little thought and perhaps some planning ahead.
- Organizing and viewing in folders
The obvious way to organize photos is by folder. If you put all the pictures from your vacation this year in a “Vacation 2016” folder, you’ll know where they are.
But that's limiting. If you want to find the best photos of your daughter, you'll have to open a huge number of folders. Or find a better way.
You can see all photos without worrying about folders. Open your Pictures library in File Explorer (Windows Explorer in Windows 7 and earlier), click the search field in the upper-right corner, and type *.jpg.
Once all the files are gathered there, right-click on an empty space in the file viewer and select View –> Extra large icons.
Of course, you'll still have a fairly large number of photos to browse through. If you can remember, even roughly, when the photo you want was taken, that can help. You can group them by date, sort them by date, or even search for them by date.
- Tagging photos
Tagging photos provides much better search capabilities. If you're looking for images of George, you can search for the tag: george. But this only works if you've taken care of it beforehand.
Every .jpg file has an editable tag field in its metadata, and you can enter multiple tags for each one. Select a photo—or a group of photos—that you want to assign a tag or tags to (separated by a semicolon). You'll find the editable Tags field in the details pane. If you're using Windows Explorer (Windows 7 or earlier), you'll probably find the field at the bottom of the pane.
If you can't see the field, select Organize –> Layout –> Details pane.
If you're using File Explorer (Windows 8.1 and 10), you probably won't see the pane until you enable it. Click the unlabeled Details pane icon located on the View tab. It's the second of two small icons next to the large Navigation pane icon (see the circled item below).
Once visible, the Details pane will appear on the right.
- Picasa 3, the photo organizer, offers new ways to search
However, if you really want to get your work done, we'd recommend downloading Google, Picasa 3. Among other things, it can recognize people's faces and can usually guess who's who (after getting to know the people you frequently photograph). It also has a timeline and can even display a map showing when a photo was taken.
Google also has a cloud-based photo organizer called Google Photos, but it's not as powerful as Picasa. For example, it can recognize faces in photos very well, but it doesn't support jpg tags. Finally, it's part of Google Drive, which means that once you go over 15GB, you'll have to pay.
