How To: Organize and Tag your Videos

Posted 07/07/2008 at 5:15pm | by Mark Soper

2

Comments

Print

If your PC is the hub for your home entertainment system, keeping track of your video collection isn’t easy. Whether it’s footage you’ve captured with your own DV camcorder, gaming trailers you’ve collected from the Internet, or archives of all your DVDs, it’s easy to wind up with loads of media files and yet have no easy way to find that one piece of video you’re dying to see. No matter what types of videos you crave, keeping them organized is an essential task. It’s also easy.

We’d love to tell you that there’s a single free program that’s ideal for keeping track of every kind of video content you own—but we can’t. We have, however, discovered a pair of free programs that can make almost any video collection easy to manage. For organizing anything other than commercial DVDs, we recommend Microsoft’s free Windows Live Photo Gallery, an update to Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery that works with both Windows Vista and Windows XP. For organizing your DVD collection, whether you prefer to play your movies from their original DVD sources or from hard-disk backup copies, you’ll want to use Rock Solid Software’s MovieManager. Both apps offer flawless organizational options for your treasure trove of titles, and we’re going to show you exactly how to use them.

Time = 128 Min

What You Need

• Windows Live Photo Gallery
  Free, www.get.live.com
• MovieManager 2.02
  Free, www.moviemanager.ca

1. Install and Configure Windows Live Photo Gallery

To get Windows Live Photo Gallery, go to the Microsoft Live website (get.live.com) and click the Get Windows Live button at the bottom of the page. By default, all Windows Live products except Family Safety for Windows Live OneCare are preselected. If you want only WLPG, uncheck the other options and click Install.

Download the application to your desktop and double-click it to fire up WLPG (Vista users will also need to provide administrator-level credentials if User Account Control is enabled.) The installer will display the programs you selected and offer a final chance to install any applications you might have neglected to check the first time around. Choose what you need, then sit back and relax while Photo Gallery and supporting tools are downloaded and installed.

WLPG might ask if it should open various types of image files. If you want to set it as the default photo-opening program for your PC, click Yes to continue. On Windows Vista, WLPG displays all the videos it finds in the current user’s Videos folder and the Public Videos folder. On Windows XP, WLPG displays the videos in the current user’s My Videos and Shared Videos folders.

To work with videos stored in other folders (such as videos made with Windows Media Center), click File, select the “Include a folder in the gallery” option, and browse to the folder you want to add to the gallery, such as Public\Recorded TV. Click OK after highlighting the folder. Click OK to close the “This folder has been added to the gallery” dialog. Repeat as needed to add folders on local or network drives.

2. Add Tags and Search By Tags

Tags are key words that describe a video or group of videos. They provide an effective means of video organization and searchability. To create a tag in WLPG, click the Create a New Tag link in the left pane and type in the name of the tag. Repeat the process for each new tag you want to create. Use tags to indicate subject, location, format—any identifier that would be useful.

You can apply your tags to any video (or still image) in your collection by selecting the file and dragging it from the center pane to the tag of your choice in the left pane. Property tagname appears when you’re holding videos over a tag as a confirmation that, yes, this is the tag you want to add to the videos. Release the mouse, and the tag is applied to the selected video clip or photo. You can add multiple tags to any video clip (or photo).

You also add tags to a video clip by right-clicking the clip and selecting Add Tags from the context menu. Add Tags fulfills the same role as the Create a New Tag option. Any tags you’ve already created for the clip will auto-populate in the text box; simply enter a new tag to join the ones you already created.

Once you’ve tagged your video clips, it’s easy to find the clips you want by selecting the related tags—expand the tag menu in the left pane and click the tag you’re interested in. Only videos (or photos) with the matching tag will be shown.

Next: How To Use MovieManager 2.02