Context

The number of photos being taken and stored is increasing substantially due to all technological advancements like digital cameras, smartphones and social networks. As a result of the increase of the number of photos being taken, it is also getting harder to manage and find photos. What is also very important to realize, is that people often are most interested in seeing photos they are actually in.

Digital photos provide benefits over old photos because you can add information about the photo and filter/search based on it. This can be anything you want. You could by example add information about:

• The year, month, day the photo was taken.
• The location the photo was taken using the name and/or GPS coordinates (some cameras and smartphones already add this information automatically).
• The event the photo was taken.
• The persons in the photo.
• Objects in the photo like by example car, plane, slide, ball, hat, etc.

It is important to realize that this information you’ve added will be saved to your photo so that other applications or online photo services (by example Flickr) can use it. These tags will also help find photos when you search in Windows even though the file name does not contain the keyword you used in the search.

From my experience however, most people simply copy the files to a folder that contains the date, location and event. By example they use a folder called “2012-09-07 Vacation Paris”. This is often because they don’t know that they can use tags and even if they do, they don’t know how to do it.

In this blog post I will try and explain how to add information to photos using Picasa, because it is free and relatively easy to use.

How to add tags to your digital photos using Picasa

To add tags to your digital photos using Picasa, basically you need to perform the following steps:

1. Download Picasa : http://picasa.google.com/
2. Install Picasa.
3. Run Picasa.
4. Import photos into Picasa.
5. Select the picture(s) you want to tag (use CTRL + left mouse click to select multiple photos simultaneously or CTRL + A to select all photos).
6. Enable the views to add tags by either:
   -Going to the top of the screen and choosing “View” and then
   -Going to the bottom right and choosing the icon for “show/hide places panel” or “show/hide tags panel”
7. Add tags / places (optionally configure quick tags to have easy access to often used tags).

In the video below I’m demonstrating this in a couple of minutes to give you a better idea of how it works:

Google also provides information about this in their own help pages:
Add geotags in Picasa
Tagging photos

Closing thoughts

I hope this was useful to you and hope it will help you enjoy your photos even more. Should you still have any questions, please let me know.