Vista, despite its flaws, is finally a step forward in the realm of the operating system – something both OS X and Linux have been failing to achieve. Still, wait for Win 7 unless you can write Vista off on taxes.

Vista and Image Tagging

Now here’s an interesting annoyance that’s made me very glad I still haven’t finished organizing the crap I pulled off three other boxes when I originally purchased this system.

Looking through some of my old (previously organized) pictures – trying to figure out if I have a picture of my living room wall before the paint inexplicably started running (protip: never use flat paint in a house with bad windows and a condensation problem)… Noticed, half the images weren’t tagged. Odd. I’ve been making it a point to tag the images. Indeed, tagging is one of the more awesome features of Vista.

Okay, maybe I just missed a few – I usually do organization at 3 AM when I’m bored to tears and awake solely due to deployments.

I go to retag an image and – nada. Error 0x88982F50: No error description available.

I do some Googling; nothing but some BS about Roxio, which ain’t my problem. I give up on Google, searching for the words ‘tag’ and ‘tagging’ is pointless thanks to everyone and their mother having a blog these days. Well, I open up a tagless file in notepad and – there are my tags. Just sitting there. Odd.

Well, at least they aren’t gone.

On a hunch, I open up a file whose tags are working and the tags are there, albeit in a weird, different format.

The plot thickens.

On another hunch, I open the tagged-but-tagless image in Photoshop and re-save it. And now the tags appear in Windows Explorer again.

Lovely – so basically, I need to run every tagged-but-tagless image on my box through Photoshop. For no explainable reason.

Man, I wish Linux didn’t suck so badly for desktop work. :p

Update: Or maybe I don’t have to run everything through PS. After choosing a small directory, sorting tags by Unspecified, selecting all images, opening with Photoshop, and re-saving… Windows Explorer crashed.

Upon restarting Explorer, all tags are now visible. Even ones that weren’t previously displaying. Gods below, I hate computers.