Organize Photos With the Tool Windows Gave You

Organize Photos With the Tool Windows Gave You

You probably have tens of thousands of photos on your PC. Finding the one you want is a daunting challenge — unless you have a system for organizing them.

Windows 10 comes with two programs that can help you organize and touch up your photos. One is plain old File Explorer — let’s assume you’re familiar with that one. The other is simply called Photos, although it’s often referred to as the Photos app. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

This article contains a lot of my personal photos. For privacy reasons, I’ve avoided pictures of actual people (other than myself). When faces couldn’t be avoided, I blurred them.

Why Use Windows Apps? Why Not Use Google Photos?

Once upon a time, both Microsoft and Google offered very good, free programs for organizing and editing your photos: Windows Photo Gallery and Picasa. Both have since been discontinued.

Google replaced Picasa with a cloud-based tool called Google Photos, which seems like an excellent choice for the job. It’s simple. It can create albums. It has face recognition. But it has a serious drawback: It’s a closed system, meaning you’re locked into organizing photos like Google wants you to — and it holds on to your information.

Google Photo might know the people in a photograph, but once you download that picture to your PC, the information is gone. Should Google decide to kill Photo (as it did with Picasa), you’ll have to start organizing all over again.

Organizing Through the Photos App

Windows 10’s Photos app organizes photos automatically. It’s simple and doesn’t waste your time. But it may not organize your photos the way you want them, and there’s little or no options for changes.

The Photos app can display four ways to view your photos

You can open Photos from the Start menu, or by double-clicking any .jpg or .png file. If you open Photos and get just one picture, select See all photos in the upper-left corner.

This will bring you to Photos’ four ways of presenting your photos.

Collection displays all of your photos, presented chronologically from newest to oldest.

Albums creates photo collections, but it’s too enthusiastic. On the day I discovered this feature, it had already created 114 albums. The good news: you can edit these albums.

People uses face recognition, but not all that well. It thinks my son is five different people. There’s no way to teach the program otherwise. Nor can you assign names.

Folders: This one is obvious.

Photos can recognize faces to help organize images, but it’s far from perfect and can’t correct itself.

There’s a search field in all four sections, but you can’t just search on anything. For instance, it can search for cat, but not for your cat’s name.

If you want your photos to organize themselves, even if they’re not organized the way you may want them, go with Photos. Otherwise, use File Explorer.

Setting Up File Explorer for Handling Photos

Open File Explorer to an appropriate folder. If you want to organize all your pictures, go to your Photo library. Otherwise, go to wherever new photos come into your PC, such a Dropbox’s Camera Uploads folder.

To get the best view of your photos, select View>Extra large icons on the ribbon.

That gives you the largest possible view of multiple photos. Then, while you’re still on the View tab, select Preview pane for a larger view of the currently-selected photo.

By selecting Extra large icons and the Preview pane, you can see more details while examining multiple pictures.

One other thing you might do: Go through your pictures and delete the ones you don’t want. Why waste storage and time?

Playing Tag

The obvious way to organize photos is to put them in appropriate folders. But that doesn’t really work well. Do you put that photo of Aunt Agatha in Tahiti in the Tahiti folder, or in the Aunt Agatha folder?

Folders can play a part in organizing photos, and I’ll get to that. But tags can do much, much more.

Tags are a part of the .jpg file format’s metadata. Every .jpg photo has a tag field, in which you can enter multiple tags – for instance: Aunt Agatha and Tahiti. Tags and other metadata travel with the photo. Many, but not all, search tools will check the metadata.

To enter tags, go to the ribbon’s View tab and select the Details pane, which replaces the Preview Pane with several editable fields. One of these will be Tags.

Select one or more photos – for instance, all of those with Uncle Mort – and type the appropriate tag in the Detail Pane’s Tags field. As you type, you can use semicolons to separate the tags.

You’re not limited to entering people’s names into the tag field. You can add places, events, and anything else. you can create an album by entering the album’s name as a tag.

File Explorer learns your tags as you go. Soon you’ll be able to type a few letters and a pop-up window will offer likely tags. Check the one you want. This not only saves typing; it also helps avoid misspellings in the tags.

When you’re done entering tags, be sure to select the Save button.

Other Organizing Tools

While the Details pane is up, you may want to type something into the Title, Comments, or Subject fields.

You can also rate photos from one to five stars, allowing you to quickly select your favorite photos.

If you select stars in the Details Pane, you can easily find your favorite pictures.

Don’t forget to Save.

You can also group pictures into folders, for instance, for vacations or special events. So long as those pictures are in your pictures library, the searches will find the tags.

Fixing Your Pictures in the Photos app

Photo organizers always come with rudimentary editing capabilities. File Explorer has only one such tool: You can right-click a photo and select either Rotate Right or Rotate Left. But the Photos app offers much more. It’s not Photoshop, but it will meet most of your needs.

Double-click a photo to bring it up in the app. Select Edit & Create>Edit to get to the tools you need.

Here you can crop photos, with an option to pick a specific aspect ratio. You can also rotate the photo by as little as one degree.

The Enhance your photo box barely does anything. But the 15 filters below it can produce some interesting and pleasing effects.

The Photos app offers easy, fun, and useful tools for enhancing your pictures.

Click Adjust, and you can fix light and color. The Clarity feature supposedly sharpens or soften the image. Be warned: You can’t really sharpen an image; it always looks fake. But you can soften it.

The Vignette option puts focus on the center of the image. You can also remove red eye and blemishes on old photos.

Searching for Your Photos

Let’s get back to File Explorer and search for some of those photos you’ve tagged. And maybe some you haven’t.

Go to the folder in question, or, if you want to search through your entire photo collection, go to your Picture library.

Type a tag, or even a part of a tag, in File Explorer’s Search field (in the upper-right corner). It could be as simple as a name. If the number of photos seems suspiciously small, scroll down and look for a link that says something like (Show all xxx).

Just type a tag, or even part of a tag, to find every photo carrying that tag.

It doesn’t have to be as simple as a name. For instance, I’ve got a tag called Pacific Coast. All I need do is type pacific and I get all the photos with that tag.

If I want photos of me at the Pacific Coast, I can simply type pacific lincoln.

Sometimes you need to be exact. If you have tags named John and John’s Family, a search for John will bring all the photos with both tags. You can limit the search by typing tag:= “john’s family” (the quotes are only necessary if there are spaces in the tag).

The label tag: tells the search engine to ignore other fields and look only in the tags. The equal sign tells it to match the entire tag, and not just a piece of it.

You can also search rated photos. In the search field, type rating:, and a pop-up will give you options for one through five stars.

By typing rating:, you can search for your favorite photos.

What about photos taken during a particular date range? You’ll notice that the ribbon’s Search tab has a Date modified option. Ignore it. You want when the photo was taken, not modified. In the search field, type something like datetaken:2008. Or datetaken:‎2/‎1/‎2011 .. ‎8/‎22/‎2012. Or if you want to find someone during a date range, tag: john datetaken:‎2/‎1/‎2011 .. ‎8/‎22/‎2012.

After a little preparation time, you’ll be able to find your photos is seconds.

Turn Off Tips and Suggestions Throughout Windows 10

Microsoft did a very controversial thing when they released Windows 10.

In several spots in the operating system, by default, they are providing tips and suggestions to users as they navigate around Windows 10.

When these items first appeared many labelled them as advertisements on Windows and felt that their OS should not be a vehicle for ads. Others viewed them as tools of discovery for apps and system capabilities in the flagship OS.

Whether you agree with Microsoft’s use of the OS in this matter or not, like many other areas of the operating system, you can customize these settings and opt-out of this information being presented on your system.

Caevat: Many of us who have been using Windows 10 since it was released are very familiar with the OS, its capabilities, and many of the apps that are available in the Microsoft Store. However, if you provide family tech support for someone who is likely not as familiar with the OS as you are, I recommend you consider leaving these discovery tools active. This will allow these users to possibly discover something they didn’t know previously and benefit from that method of discovery.

However, if you are ready to shut these suggestions and tips down on your Windows 10 device, there are six spots to address all of them. Five are within the Windows Settings app and one is in File Explorer.

Let’s go down the list.

Notifications & actions

There are two settings to toggle off on the Windows Settings > System > Notifications & actions page. They are:

– Show me the Windows welcome experience after updates and occasionally when I sign in to highlight what’s new and suggested.

– Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows

These items primarily show up as toast notifications for the Action Center. If you have Quiet Hours activated then they will not pop a toast notification but they will be waiting for you to review in the Action Center.

Lock screen

You will find this toggle on the Windows Settings > Personalization > Lock screen page.

– Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen

You will see these items on the Lock screen that is the default display before you interact with it using Windows Hello facial or fingerprint recognition or activating the log in dialog by touching the keyboard or mouse.

They do not appear at any other location nor do they move to the Action Center for later retrieval.

Start

When you go to  Windows Settings > Personalization > Start you will find this toggle switch.

– Occasionally show suggestions in Start

The suggestions that appear in the Start Menu sidebar listing when this is turned on consists of app suggestions. No other suggestions are made on the Start Menu with this setting.

Cortana on the Lock Screen

On the Windows Settings > Cortana > Talk to Cortana settings page, there is an option under Lock Screen that enables you to toggle Cortana’s use when your device is locked.

If you toggle the Use Cortana even when my device is locked setting, then you will not get any Cortana related tips on the Lock Screen at all. However, if you want to use Cortana’s voice activation on the Lock Screen and do not want any tips showing up there, you will need to make sure you are not using Picture or Slideshow as your background on the Lock Screen. That only leaves you Windows Spotlight as an option to not get Cortana tips on the Lock Screen with voice activation turned on.

Pen & Windows Ink

The app recommendations for this option under Windows Settings > Devices > Pen & Windows Ink focus on apps that take advantage of the inking capability on your Windows 10 device.

They also show up in the Windows Ink Workspace menu even if you do not have a touch or ink enabled device.

To turn these app suggestions off you will find the toggle under the Windows Ink Workspace header.

Show Sync Provider Notifications

This is the one setting that is located outside of the Windows Settings app.

As you can see above, it is located in the Folder Options > View tab dialog box and does require that you scroll down that list of Advanced settings to find the one labelled Show sync provider notifications.

These notifications show up below the ribbon toolbar in File Explorer and are usually related to OneDrive cloud storage.

Just un-select the checkbox marked Show sync provider notifications and click the Apply button to turn them off.

At this point you have turned off all the tips and suggestion areas of Windows 10 and should not see anything else similar throughout the operating system.