Windows Live Photo Gallery has a great tool that lets you rate your photos. This can be really helpful because there is also a tool that lets you filter your photos by rating. This means if I had a photo, lets say it’s a beautiful shot of the Statendam, I could rate it a 5 star picture. Then lets say I have another great shot of the Digital Workshop, so I rate that one as 5 stars as well. When I filter my photos by 5 stars, Windows Live Photo Gallery will pull together all of your 5 star photos, so in my example you would be seeing the photo of the Statendam and the Digital Workshop together. The pictures can be of completely different things, but by rating them both as 5 stars, they have 5 stars in common.
So how do you rate a photo and filter by rating…
1. In Windows Live Photo Gallery choose the photo you want to rate. Put your pointer over the picture and double click on it. This will open it up in a larger view. At the top of your screen you will see a button that says “Info”. Put your pointer over the “Info” button and click once. This will open up a menu on the right side of your screen.
2. Towards the bottom of the menu you will see a section that says “Information”. About half way down that section you will see where it says “Rating” and it shows 5 stars. These are empty stars, and we always work with gold stars. So to actually rate your picture and give it gold stars you put your pointer on the star and click once. We work from left to right, so if you think your picture is not that great and want to give it a 1 star rating go ahead and click once on the very first star on the left. But if you think it’s a great picture go ahead and give it 5 stars, so you will need to click on the 5th star from the left, and you will see you now have 5 gold stars.
This is what you will see on the bottom right side of your screen before you rate your picture (before you click on the star) and then after you rate it with the gold stars.
……. 
3. To save the information you just added…the rating, you will want to look the top left corner and click on the “Back to Gallery” button.
4. Now you can filter your pictures using your ratings. Look to the top right corner and you will see something that says “Filter By rating” and then those familiar looking 5 empty stars. Now, if you click on the 5th star it will pull up all of your 5 star rated pictures.
