Photo Organizer by GearMage for Windows

Photo Event Organizer takes a unique approach to organizing your digital snapshots: it scans your images and automatically organizes them based on the day they were taken, called the Event. Events don't have to be a big deal--"that day you took a bunch of pictures" will do. But the idea makes sense since folks tend to snap a lot of pictures on birthdays, dates, at ballgames, and other events, then plug in their USB cable and and upload the lot to one big archive, sometimes even one big folder.

While Photo Event Organizer's compressed file downloaded and extracted normally, its installer is one of the slowest we've ever experienced; your mileage may vary. The process did finish, eventually, so stick with it if it seems slow. The program's easy to use: browse to a folder in the simple, efficient interface, set an "event gap" of 2 to 31 days (you can add months and years, too) and press Organize. Photo Event Organizer doesn't move your photos; it just keeps track of them. It scanned our images and created two events separated by about two weeks, based on the days we'd taken the photos. Clicking on an event opens its thumbnails in the preview pane. For events that are closely grouped over several days, such as the holiday season, the program organized them into subevents labeled Day-1, Day-2, and so on. We renamed our Events to something more personal than "Event-1" and clicked Save Events to save our entire event structure. Clicking an image thumbnail opened the image in Windows Photo Viewer. Instructions are easy to find; click "Instructions" on the interface.

One great thing about Photo Event Organizer is the way it lets you target individual folders and events. You may be too busy to sort through gigabytes of snapshots just now, but you can organize your Great Aunt Gertrude's birthday pictures and post them like you promised before your mother has to ask you again, which she hopes she doesn't have to do, can't you? Get the picture?