Tagging photos makes them quick and easy to find. Sifting through hundreds or maybe thousands of pictures trying to find the exact one that you need is a thankless task.
But if you’ve got your pictures tagged, then you can get Windows to search for them.
In this guide, we’ll look at how to tag photos in Windows and how to search for those tags.
What Is A Photo Tag?
Tags are additional information that you add to a photo. Tags work like keywords, special words that are attached to the photo, which you can then search for.
Every photo on your computer will have a filename, but those filenames are usually just meaningless numbers.
They don’t give you any indication of what or who is in the photo.
But if you add tags to the picture, you can say who exactly is in the picture, what they’re doing, where the photo was taken etc. So your tags might be something like –
grandpa, bob g, wally, alfred, pete, street cafe.
Now if you need to find that photo again, you can have Windows search through your pictures for any one of those tags. Any one of those keywords.
How To Add A Tag To A Photo In Windows.
Adding a tag to a photo in Windows is really quite easy to do.
To tag a photo, right click on it.
The options menu opens, left click on PROPERTIES, which is usually at the bottom of the menu.
The Properties dialogue window will open. Left-click on the DETAILS tab.
At the top of the Details tab, in the Description section, you’ll see the Tags.
Currently the photo doesn’t have any tags added to it. We’re going to fix that.
Adding A Tag.
To add a tag to your photo, left click once in the empty space in the “Value” column.
You’ll see the “Add a tag” box appear.
If you’re only adding a single tag, type it in and then click the OK button.
For multiple tags, separate them with a comma and then a space.
If You Can’t See The Tags Category On Your Photo.
If you can’t see a Tags category for the photo you’re trying to add a tag to, then it can’t be tagged. Not all files can be tagged.
Only JPEG photos can have tags added in this way.
You can get around that by opening the picture in an image editor and then re-saving it as a JPEG. Not a perfect solution but better than nothing.
Tag Multiple Photos At Once.
If you’ve got hundreds of photos that all need to be tagged, you’re in for a long weekend.
However you can speed things up by applying tags to multiple pictures at the same time.
Select all the pictures that are going to have the same tags.
To do that, hold down the CTRL key (Control Key) and left-click once on each picture.
You’ll see that each one you click on becomes selected.
When all the files you want to tag are selected, right-click on one of them. It doesn’t matter which one, just right-click on one of the selected photos.
The options menu opens. Left-click Properties, then click on the Details tab.
Add whatever information you want to use for your tags.
How To Search For Photos.
The great thing about adding tags to your photos is the ease in which you can find them again later.
Open the folder where you store your photos. That’s usually going to be your Pictures folder.
Then type the tag that you’re looking for in the Search box in the top right hand corner of the window.
Windows will search the folder as you type. It’ll check filenames and tags.
Summary.
It’s a shame that Windows doesn’t have a way of tagging photos other than JPEGs. Other than that it works really well.
You don’t need to download and install any third party software. Windows will just do it for you.
