Now that you've owned a digital camera for a while, chances are good that your collection of digital photos is growing to the point where it's becoming completely unmanageable. If you find yourself drowning in a sea of digital images and you just can't remember where you stored that picture of Cousin Betty at the beach from your vacation two years ago, you might want to consider the benefits of tagging.

Basically, a tag is nothing more than a keyword that describes the image to which it is attached. The premise behind tagging is a simple one: The more tags you assign to an image, the better your chances of finding it. In the example of the seashore photo, logical tags would be Betty or 2006 vacation.

It turns out that there are a number of standards out there that attempt to regulate many of the different characteristics associated with digital images. Some of the standards apply to compression. For example, the JPEG standard reduces the digital information that represents the image we see so that the physical size of that file becomes substantially smaller.

Other standards such as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) and XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) allow text to be invisibly imbedded within digital images. Adobe's Photoshop Album and Apple's iPhoto are two examples of programs that can read and act upon these invisible text tags, or "metadata," so that you can more easily search through and locate the images that meet your search criteria.

But adding these tags yourself can be somewhat cumbersome and hit and miss, at best, when you're trying to add them to hundreds – if not thousands – of photos. Say you take a picture of your cousin's family at the beach. You probably would add her name and the name of everyone in the picture. You may even add the date, location and the event.

But there's probably a whole lot going on in that picture that you wouldn't consider adding as a tag, even though it might come in useful when you're trying to find that picture a year or two later. Where did I put that picture we took at the beach in Hawaii with Cousin Betty wearing that pink bathing suit and her son eating a hot dog? If you didn't add the tags hot dog, beach, pink and bathing suit, you're not going to find it using those keywords. But there is a service that will add all those relevant search tags to your photos for you.

Tagcow lets you send one photo or thousands to be tagged automatically. Tagcow officials say they employ people who are expert at examining subject matter in pictures. They also use a sophisticated artificial intelligence inference engine that looks at the images and then adds tags of its own. Together, the service can process literally thousands of photographic images within a typical time frame of 24 to 48 hours after submission. Tagcow is understandably secretive about the exact details of the process.

Once your images are tagged, they are uploaded back to your computer for use in any of your photo applications as well as online services such as Flickr or SmugMug, both of which can read the imbedded metadata. If you already have your images entered into Flickr, just enter your Flickr account information, and Tagcow will connect to Flickr, pull down the photos, submit them for tagging and post the tags to your images in Flickr.

Tagcow offers a variety of tagging plans that begin at $9.95 to tag 250 images. Check out the service's Web site for more pricing plans. Privacy is also an important issue, so be sure to read Tagcow's privacy policy before you commit to downloading your pictures to them.

With all of your photos properly tagged, you might be amazed at how easy it will be to search and locate virtually any single picture or collection of images.

For more details, visit www.tagcow.com.

Palm Beach resident Craig Crossman writes about technology. He also hosts the longest-running nationwide computer radio talk show, "Computer America," heard on the Business TalkRadio and Lifestyle TalkRadio networks Monday through Friday, 10 p.m. to midnight, ET. The program also can be heard via the live streaming audio at his Web site, www.computeramerica.com. E-mail him at ccrossman@computeramerica.com.