Quick answer: Sort photos into folders by date and place, name them consistently, and rate and tag the keepers. Productivity Plus Pack adds these workflows to File Explorer: Organize Folder uses photo dates and GPS locations, People+ recognizes faces locally, and Rate+ and Tag+ add searchable ratings and tags to supported files.
This guide is also part of our real-world workflows: practical ways to use several tools together.
Try it: find your favorite pictures of Grandma
Start with copies of photos from a birthday, a holiday and a family gathering. The goal is to find your favorite pictures of Grandma across those events without copying them into another collection of folders.
- Add the sample folders to People+ and review the face groups. Name Grandma's group and correct any mistaken matches before relying on the results.
- Use Tag+ to label the occasion, such as Birthday or Summer holiday. Keep people names in the People metadata and event labels in tags so each has a clear purpose.
- Use Rate+ to give your favorite supported photos four or five stars. A rating records your choice; face recognition does not pick the best photograph for you.
- In Settings > Navigation+, build a filter combining Grandma's name with a rating of at least four stars. Include the photo folders in Windows Search's indexed locations and allow the index to update.
- Open the filter from the Search filters section in Explorer. Check that the results include the favorites you expected from each event.
People+ recognizes faces. Tag Sense AI has a different role: it can suggest content-based tags for supported images. Review those suggestions separately; they do not replace naming and checking the people in your photos.
The result is a reusable view of your favorites across events. If you also want dated folders and readable filenames, continue with Organize Folder below, or follow the photo organization walkthrough.
Why photo libraries get out of hand
Phones, cameras, messaging apps and cloud backups all drop photos onto your PC with names like IMG_4031.jpg or PXL_20260612_183512.jpg. A few years later, you have tens of thousands of them and no idea where last summer's holiday went.
A good photo library answers three questions quickly: when was it taken, where, and who is in it. Here's a system that answers all three, using File Explorer and the tools you already have.
1. Sort photos into folders by date and place
Folders by date are the backbone of most photo libraries: one folder per day or event, inside a folder per year or month. Adding the place makes events easy to spot at a glance.
Doing that by hand means opening each photo to check when and where it was taken. Organize Folder reads that information from the photo itself instead. Right-click a folder of photos and choose Organize folder > Photos, and it:
- Renames each photo to
Date - Location - People - Original Filename, for example2026-06-12 - Seattle, Washington, United States - Anna and Ben - PXL_20260612_183512.jpg. - Moves it into a
Date\Locationsubfolder. - Uses the date the photo was taken, falling back to the file's creation date when the photo has none.
- Turns the photo's GPS coordinates into a place name using geographic data built into the pack — offline, with no online lookup.
Both the naming and the folder pattern can be changed in Settings, and the destination can even be another drive, like E:\Photos. Changed your mind? Right-click the folder and choose Undo last organize.
2. Find the people in your photos
"Every photo of Grandma" is one of the most common things people look for, and one of the hardest to find with folders alone.
People+ recognizes faces with AI that runs entirely on your PC. You choose which photo folders it scans, review the groups of faces it finds, and give each person a name. The names are written into the photos' standard metadata, so they appear in File Explorer's People column and you can search File Explorer for them.
Already named people in Windows Photos, Picasa or Lightroom? People+ can import those names and use them to recognize the same people in the rest of your library. And once people are named, Organize Folder's Photos option includes them in the file names.
Step by step: How to find photos of yourself and your family on your PC.
3. Rate the keepers and tag the themes
Not every photo deserves the same attention. Star ratings separate the best from the rest; tags group photos across dates and folders — Birthdays, Garden, Recipes, Receipts.
- Select photos, right-click and choose a star rating with Rate+ or a tag with Tag+. Several at once works too.
- Stars and tags show right on the thumbnails in File Explorer's larger icon views.
- JPG, HEIC and TIFF photos keep their ratings and tags inside the file, so they travel with the photo to other apps and devices.
- Let Tag Sense AI tag JPG and PNG images by content — handy for screenshots, scanned documents and receipts.
4. Find any photo in seconds
With dates, places, people, ratings and tags in place, finding photos becomes a search instead of a scroll:
- Open the Search filters section in Explorer's navigation pane for one-click filters by tag and rating.
- Build your own filters that combine Person, Rating, Tag and dates — for example all photos of me rated 4 stars or more from the last year.
- Search File Explorer for a person's name or a place.
More on searching: How to find files by tags, ratings, dates and other metadata.
What Windows already gives you
Windows has a good foundation to build on. The Photos app lets you browse your pictures by date and by folder and can import photos from your phone or camera, and File Explorer can group a folder by Date taken. Productivity Plus Pack builds on that: the organizing happens in your own folders, and everything it adds is stored as standard metadata that other apps can read.