With the explosion of digital photography it is easy to be swamped with so many photos that it is hard to find , organize and share them with friends and family. Fortunately there are a number of free utilities that can help out.

A key concept to accessing photos is moving beyond simply organizing them in well named folders like Christmas 2009 or Maggie Graduation. The next step to being able to find and use your images is to use the rating, flagging and tagging features that are part of Windows 7 to add descriptive information to files, allowing you to sort and find images using a range of criteria. There are a number of free tools to help with this and of course the File Manger in Windows enables you to do this with any file but there are some tools that have additional features to aid in the task. One that you may already have on your Windows 7 machine is Microsoft Live Photo Gallery a free App from http://Microsoft.com/downloads.  This application allows you to preview, edit and organize all your photos and videos.  It also includes interesting features like the ability resize selected images at the same time or stitch several photos together into an amazing panorama.

Ratings allow you to rate your images or videos on a simple “5 Star” scale.  Various “tags” can be added including descriptive tags, people tags and geotags.

You can use the Batch People Tag feature to search through your photos and automatically tag people using facial recognition.  This is a great feature that works quite well, making it easy to find all the pictures of Grandma. Or apply a descriptive tag like “Church Picnic” to a selection of images. Once you have tagged and rated your photos you can easily filter the thumbnail view to only show pictures that have Bob AND Sue AND have the “Toronto” geotag.

You can then use the built in “Share” feature to transfer selected photos or videos to your favorite sites like Flickr , Facebook or YouTube.

I like using the SkyDrive feature which provides 25 Gb “in the Cloud” to store my photos , videos and any other files in “the cloud” for easy access from anywhere including my phone.