Managing Tags on Pictures?

I am running Vista Ultimate RTM, and I have imported a few thousand pictures
that I have collected over the years. They all show up just fine in Windows
Photo Gallery. However, they've obviously been TAGged at source, and most of
the TAGs are useless/meaningless to me, and so I want to remove them. But
there are hundreds and hundreds of them. I can't seem to see any way to
manage TAGs other than one at a time. Is there anyway that I can delete
whole groups of them in one go rather than singly?

--
</Slugsie>

If I do a CTRL-A to select all the photos, then all the tags assigned to all
those pictures get added to the right sidebar in Photo Gallery. They're
broken into tags assigned to all the photos and tags assigned to some of
them. Assuming you've got some duplication in tags and not thousands of
individual ones, you can right-click on the tags you don't want in that
sidebar and delete them.


"Slugsie" <slugsie_no_spim@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:u1KlKvYOHHA.3668@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>I am running Vista Ultimate RTM, and I have imported a few thousand
>pictures that I have collected over the years. They all show up just fine
>in Windows Photo Gallery. However, they've obviously been TAGged at source,
>and most of the TAGs are useless/meaningless to me, and so I want to remove
>them. But there are hundreds and hundreds of them. I can't seem to see any
>way to manage TAGs other than one at a time. Is there anyway that I can
>delete whole groups of them in one go rather than singly?
>
> --
> </Slugsie>

Thanks, that does help a bit. There are hundreds of individual tags, and
only some of them are associated with multiple pictures. The list that doing
the Ctrl-A produces is the same as you get on the left side when you show
the entire contents of the gallery, but at least you can multi select from
it.

--
</Slugsie>
"David A. Lessnau" <DavidALessnau@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:75B32429-D9D1-4097-A69B-E31164D2A22A@microsoft.com...
> If I do a CTRL-A to select all the photos, then all the tags assigned to
> all those pictures get added to the right sidebar in Photo Gallery.
> They're broken into tags assigned to all the photos and tags assigned to
> some of them. Assuming you've got some duplication in tags and not
> thousands of individual ones, you can right-click on the tags you don't
> want in that sidebar and delete them.
>
>
> "Slugsie" <slugsie_no_spim@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:u1KlKvYOHHA.3668@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>>I am running Vista Ultimate RTM, and I have imported a few thousand
>>pictures that I have collected over the years. They all show up just fine
>>in Windows Photo Gallery. However, they've obviously been TAGged at
>>source, and most of the TAGs are useless/meaningless to me, and so I want
>>to remove them. But there are hundreds and hundreds of them. I can't seem
>>to see any way to manage TAGs other than one at a time. Is there anyway
>>that I can delete whole groups of them in one go rather than singly?
>>
>> --
>> </Slugsie>
>

OK, that only sort of works. It removes the tags from the pictures, but it
doesn't remove the tags from the database (which is what I want), so the
list on the left is now studded with hundreds of tags that have no pictures
associated!

OK, how do I clear them out easily?

--
</Slugsie>
"David A. Lessnau" <DavidALessnau@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:75B32429-D9D1-4097-A69B-E31164D2A22A@microsoft.com...
> If I do a CTRL-A to select all the photos, then all the tags assigned to
> all those pictures get added to the right sidebar in Photo Gallery.
> They're broken into tags assigned to all the photos and tags assigned to
> some of them. Assuming you've got some duplication in tags and not
> thousands of individual ones, you can right-click on the tags you don't
> want in that sidebar and delete them.
>
>
> "Slugsie" <slugsie_no_spim@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:u1KlKvYOHHA.3668@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>>I am running Vista Ultimate RTM, and I have imported a few thousand
>>pictures that I have collected over the years. They all show up just fine
>>in Windows Photo Gallery. However, they've obviously been TAGged at
>>source, and most of the TAGs are useless/meaningless to me, and so I want
>>to remove them. But there are hundreds and hundreds of them. I can't seem
>>to see any way to manage TAGs other than one at a time. Is there anyway
>>that I can delete whole groups of them in one go rather than singly?
>>
>> --
>> </Slugsie>
>

Unfortunately, I can't really come up with an easy way to do this. The only
thing that comes to mind is pretty drastic. I wouldn't do it without having
good backups/copies and time to spare. But, if you were willing to
experiment, once you got all the spurious tags out of the actual pictures
(you deleted them from the right side, but they still show on the left
side), you could delete all your (newly backed-up and copied in a separate,
offline place) pictures. Then, close Photo Gallery and re-open it to make
sure all the left-side tags are gone. Close Photo Gallery, copy your
tagless-photos back from a backup location, open Photo Gallery and
re-import. Yuck. All this because I have no idea where Photo Gallery's tag
database is stored. I know the tags themselves are stored in the photos.
But, I have no idea where Photo Gallery keeps its pointer to that tag
information. If we knew where that list was, you could just delete it and,
hopefully, Photo Gallery would re-create it upon program entry. Sorry I
can't come up with anything more helpful.


"Slugsie" <slugsie_no_spim@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:779D0C5B-81A4-4C4F-9748-3BBF549C0B60@microsoft.com...
> OK, that only sort of works. It removes the tags from the pictures, but it
> doesn't remove the tags from the database (which is what I want), so the
> list on the left is now studded with hundreds of tags that have no
> pictures associated!
>
> OK, how do I clear them out easily?
>
> --
> </Slugsie>
> "David A. Lessnau" <DavidALessnau@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
> message news:75B32429-D9D1-4097-A69B-E31164D2A22A@microsoft.com...
>> If I do a CTRL-A to select all the photos, then all the tags assigned to
>> all those pictures get added to the right sidebar in Photo Gallery.
>> They're broken into tags assigned to all the photos and tags assigned to
>> some of them. Assuming you've got some duplication in tags and not
>> thousands of individual ones, you can right-click on the tags you don't
>> want in that sidebar and delete them.
>>
>>
>> "Slugsie" <slugsie_no_spim@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:u1KlKvYOHHA.3668@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>>>I am running Vista Ultimate RTM, and I have imported a few thousand
>>>pictures that I have collected over the years. They all show up just fine
>>>in Windows Photo Gallery. However, they've obviously been TAGged at
>>>source, and most of the TAGs are useless/meaningless to me, and so I want
>>>to remove them. But there are hundreds and hundreds of them. I can't seem
>>>to see any way to manage TAGs other than one at a time. Is there anyway
>>>that I can delete whole groups of them in one go rather than singly?
>>>
>>> --
>>> </Slugsie>
>>
>