Here's an easy way to sort your photographs. [09-24-09]

I’m going to revisit a feature of Vista and a feature that can be added to XP via a download. The reason is because of the number of Good Booters who have discovered that although they’ve organized their photos with Picasa or Photoshop Elements, to be sure their photos are permanently sorted in their Pictures or My Pictures folder they must create individual folders and relocate the appropriate photos into them.

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 quite as resourceful as Vista's Check Box feature, will provide a similar check box opportunity.

Note: The value of check boxes is not limited to relocating photos, it can be used to safely copy or move any file or folder or group of files and folders.

To turn the checkbox feature off in Vista simply uncheck the "Use check boxes to select items" checkbox. In XP, delete the Trayprodder utility.

A Good Boot tip: Vista’s "Switch between windows" utility can be is a handy way to view all your open applications. But here’s a way to cascade, stack or view "all" your open Vista or XP applications side by side.

Holding down your keyboard Ctrl key, left click on the Taskbar buttons of the applications you want to cascade, stack or view side by side. When they’re all highlighted right click on any one of them and select a view.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot.