Need Help Finding Software

[Rick540]

I recently installed Windows 7. As I'm sure most of you know, Windows 7 has Windows Photo Viewer, not Windows Photo Gallery which was included in Vista only. The problem is that Windows Photo Viewer doesn't let you easily add star ratings to photos. Typically when I have a huge number of photos to sort through, I would use Photo Gallery to go through them and I would add a star rating to the ones I wanted to keep. When I was done, I could sort photos in the folder by rating and simply delete the ones without a rating and voila, I was left with only the good photos. When I sorted photos with Windows Photo Gallery, I could use the right/left arrow keys to move through the pictures and simply hit 1-5 on the keyboard or keypad to add a star rating. This whole process made things quick and easy.

For reasons I don't understand, Microsoft took the info pane out of Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 7. Now, to get the same functionality and ease of use that I had with Vista and Photo Gallery I have to install Live Photo Gallery. The problem here is that one, Live photo gallery is REALLY bloated. Secondly, I find the act of manually adding photos/folders of photos to Live Photo Gallery tedious every time I want to sort some pictures.

So, does anyone know of a small application that will allow me to sift through photos like I did with Vista and Photo Gallery? The main thing I'm looking for is the ability to move forward and backward through the photos with the arrow keys and add star ratings with the keypad/keyboard numbers.

Thanks in advance.

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[BoxPhotographer]

Well, if you are going to become more serious about photography, CS4 includes Adobe Bridge which is great for sorting photo's. You can reject files, add stars, view the exif data etc.

[Rick540]

I decided I'll just stick with Live Photo Gallery after all. Live Photo Gallery installs a bunch of junk along with the application, but I found that I can uninstall pretty much all of it and Photo Gallery still remains functional.

To the person above that mentioned Adobe, I appreciate the response and seeing as how this is a photography forum, I know most of you use Photoshop and other Adobe apps, but these days I avoid Adobe like the plague. Adobe gives a whole new meaning to the word bloated.

[KmH]

I decided I'll just stick with Live Photo Gallery after all. Live Photo Gallery installs a bunch of junk along with the application, but I found that I can uninstall pretty much all of it and Photo Gallery still remains functional.

To the person above that mentioned Adobe, I appreciate the response and seeing as how this is a photography forum, I know most of you use Photoshop and other Adobe apps, but these days I avoid Adobe like the plague. Adobe gives a whole new meaning to the word bloated.

Adobe has software specifically designed to manage large image databases. It's called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.