It's been about three weeks since Windows Live Photo Gallery became available for Windows XP and Windows Vista computers and the webDotWizards are starting to get the hang of it.

To recap from the last column, Windows Live Photo Gallery is one part of the Windows Live Suite which can be downloaded from http://get.live.com/wl/all and its purpose is to help us organise and view our photos by using one or more tags per photo. Live Photo Gallery also enables us to import photos from our cameras and scanners, edit photos (e.g., adjust brightness or saturation and remove red-eye), archive photos to a CD, and upload photos to a new or old album on our Live Space.

As well, Live Photo Gallery organises our videos and we're able to directly upload our own videos online at Soapbox on MSN Video.

Using one or more tags for each photo and video can boggle the mind a bit at the first attempt but once you start using tags you immediately see the benefit.

Since you apply as many tags as you want to any photo or video, begin by using a general tag such as Holidays to a group of holiday photos. You enjoyed a holiday at different places, e.g. New Zealand, so New Zealand would be a tag to apply to those particular photos. You may have visited the South Island of New Zealand on one holiday and the North Island on another trip so you can select all the South Island photos and tag them as such. Similarly you'd tag the photos you took on your North Island holiday.

Thus far you'd be able to click the Holdiays tag and get your holiday photos. Choosing the  New Zealand tag would display just your photos from your New Zealand trips. To narrow down the list of photos, you could then click either the North Island or South Island tag.

You can further tag those New Zealand photos: there may be photos of gardens, mountains, volcanoes, glaciers or city streets so tags can be used to further help you search later on for particular photos. Note how a tag such as Gardens will probably be used for photos not taken in New Zealand but that's ok because you can find all photos of gardens and, if you want, narrow down the display of only gardens in New Zealand by clicking the New Zealand tag.

The best time to tag your photos is now! When downloading photos from your camera, apply a tag to the groups that Live Photo Gallery organises for you (or use the slider at the bottom right of the wizard to adjust the date/time span). You can change the tag on individual photos later on.

If you've got hundreds of photos on your hard drive, select groups of photos that can be given a general tag such as Gardens or Flowers or Birds. Then display these different groups and apply another tag that better describes sub-groups. For example display all your Flowers photos and choose your roses photos  and tag them as Roses.

You'll find as you build up more tags the tagging task becomes simpler. Remember that you can select a group of photos and drag them over to a tag you've already got to apply that tag to the group.

A reminder to keep your camera's date and time setting correct because Live Photo Gallery also organises your photos in date and time order. As well as viewing your photos using your tags, you can view photos taken on a particular day of the week.

The webDotWizards who use Photo Story for Windows have realised how useful it would be to be able to import their photos using tags. Similarly using tags to select photos to attach to a message in Hotmail or Windows Live Mail would make life much easier. Perhaps these applications will integrate more closely with Live Photo Gallery in the future.

Get tagging and enjoy your photos!

Note: You'll find a supplementary article, Live Photo Gallery hints and tips - using tags on webDotWiz Online has a Space that has plenty of screenshots to help you get started with tagging your photos.

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