Vista can help you sort out those holiday photos

By now I’ll wager many "Digital Point and Shooters" have downloaded their holiday photos with the intent to sort them. Or perhaps are contemplating an early start on their new years resolution to organize the "shoe box" sort of their My Pictures/ Pictures folder.

If you’re involved or contemplating becoming involved in sorting your photos, Vista provides a user friendly way to expedite your sorting adventure.

To enable this feature click Start > Documents > Organize > "Folder and Search Options". Click the View tab, scroll down and click on the "Use check boxes to select items" checkbox.

Although you can still continue holding down the Ctrl key to click on individual photos or holding down the Shift key to select groups of photos, you can now simply click on the check boxes in front of each photo to make individual selections. Or if you want to select all the photos in a folder, click the check box to the left of the "Name" column.

If you’ve just a few photos you do not want to relocate mixed in with those you do, click on the check boxes of the ones you do not want to relocate. Then on your Toolbar click Edit > Invert Selection. Now, only the ones you want to relocate will be checked.

Unfortunately XP doesn’t provide this feature. However there’s a small freeware program TrayProdder (Google TrayProdder) that although it’s not as resourceful as Vista’s Check Box feature, will provide a similar check box opportunity.

I’m sure Vista users are delighted to have discovered the old XP Drag and Drop Bogeyman has been eliminated. That when a group of file has been selected using the Ctrl key if you move your mouse pointer more than 4 pixels while "clicking down" on a file, Windows assumes you’ve dragged the files where you want to relocate them and executes the drop (copy).

Unfortunately rather than relocating the files Xpers may discover they’ve simply made copies in the current folder of the selected files.

Xpers can eliminate this frustration by going to Microsoft's Web site and downloading Microsoft’s free Tweak UI for Windows XP.

One of its features allows you to configure XP’s drag setting. Click on it’s "Mouse" feature and change the value under "Drag" to something more than 4 pixels.

Note: Somewhere between 10-20 but no more than 20 pixels should stop accidental copying.

Now you’ve no excuse not to organize your photos!

Here’s wishing you a Good boot.