In the good old days when XP ruled the world, my photo collection was one big mess. I had about 12.000 photos and videos from the past 5 years. They were all in their own folder, named something like 2002-08-20, to indicate that the pictures in that folder were taken the 20th of august 2002. It was actually quite hard to find a particular photo, if I didn't know the exact date it was taken.

Then... da da daaaa... Microsoft released Windows Vista including the brand new Windows Photo Gallery. After a few days many of my photos were tagged, so they were easy to find again. The great thing about tags in Windows Photo Gallery is that it allows you to create a hierarchic tagging structure. The way it is done, is that if I want to tag a picture from Nice in France, I tag it Location/France/Nice. Then in the left side of the program in the Tags category, it will show up with only Location. If I click Place, it will show me France and a click on France will show me Nice. Under Nice I can then see all my photos from Nice. Nice feature

My tag hierarchy consists of three main tags, Event, Location and People. A part of it looks something like this, except it's in danish:

• Event
  • Work
  • Holiday
    • Nice
    • Sunny Beach
  • Party
  • Birthday
    • Brian, 30
    • Lise, 23
    • Lise, 24
    • Niels, 25
    • Niels, 26
    • Niels, 27
  • Nature
    • Flowers
    • Animals
    • Sea
    • Sunset
    • Snow
• People
  • Work
  • Family
    • Lise
    • Hans Harald
    • Niels
  • Old friends
  • University
  • Friends
• Location
  • France
    • Nice
  • Bulgaria
    • Sunny Beach
    • Burgas
  • Monaco
  • Denmark
    • Århus
      • Home
      • Tivoli

With that kind of structure, it's quite easy to find exactly the picture I want to find.

Yesterday Microsoft released a new beta of their Live suite, including Windows Live Photo Gallery beta. And I can tell you it's a great program! I have a bunch of new features, but look like the good old Windows Photo Gallery. I especially like the new panorama feature. Just select two or more photos that are taken of the same thing right click and select Create panoramic photo. Then computer will then work hard for a few seconds to combine the selected photo into one big panoramic photo.

Here you can see 8 pictures from the harbor in Monaco combined to one giant photo and the cropped with the cropping tool in Windows Live Photo Gallery (click the photos to see them in full size - might take a while to load as they are pretty big):

And one more photo, combined of just two photos - still from Monaco:

I just love these features! I'm sure they are useful to you too... so why don't you go download Windows Live Photo Gallery?