Organising Photos in Windows 7

I have been getting never ending headaches trying to organize photos in windows 7.
With XP or Vista I could simply drag the thumbnails around to the order I want in the folder , then select all , then mass rename and that order would remain - even after closing and reopening folder.
With Windows 7 , it will just hold the order based on NAME , regardless of where I try and drag the photo. Can I stop 7 doing this. Also , selecting sort "BY DATE" or any other "SORT BY" option is no use to me , I want to sort them randomly based on what they show - hence I don't want windows to do any rearranging until I have sorted and renamed them in the order I want.
If I have say 500 photos , and want to view in a particular order as a slide show , then it is not practical to rename every single photo individually so that windows 7 will display in the order I want ( this would take hours , as opposed to about 10 mins using drag and drop as I did with Vista and XP ). - and while on the subject of ORDER , am I able to organize folders in any area - eg MY DOCUMENTS the way I want , rather than instantly defaulting to alphabetical as WINDOWS 7 seems to do ??

Zardoc's first tip seems to be what I want - haven't tried it yet though.

I am interested in the "Windows Live Essentials" idea as well - but does tagging mean I have to manually number each photo ( sorry I'm not quite sure what you mean by TAGGING ) - if that is the case , then it is much more time consuming than just dragging around to the order I want and then doing a "Select All" mass "Rename" when I have the desired order ??

Thanks for your suggestions.

This tutorial may help you to be able to sort the image the way you wish:
How to Disable Auto Arrange in Windows 7 Explorer to have Free Sorting

Thanks Imperfect1 , I think the tutorial is the solution Zardoc is referring to , using a registry download to disable auto arrange - not sure why WINDOWS 7 doesn't just have that option in the drop down under SORT BY though.

Still curious about the tagging method referred to by Dzomlija - does tagging involve manually typing a number or name for every file/image or is it some sort of quick mass tagging thing ??

donnie1, Hi.

Tagging is a way to organise your photos, much in the same way as you can id3 tag your mp3's. Think of a song - it has metadata saved in the file that contains non-audio data: the track title, track number, Artist name, album title, genre, year and more.

Tagging your photos is a way to organise: say you have 500 photos, and you want to only see the ones with you in them. You would tag them with your name and any other information you want. Then you could filter your photos. For example all photos taken in 2010. Or all photos taken at Christmas, or all taken indoors. The possibilities are endless.

donnie1 said:

Still curious about the tagging method referred to by Dzomlija - does tagging involve manually typing a number or name for every file/image or is it some sort of quick mass tagging thing ??

As Dzomlija and Zardoc have said, windows Live Essentials' Photo Gallery is a great tool. You could also use a third party application, for example the excellent Zoner Photo Studio to tag and organise your photos. Zoner also has batch editing which makes bulk renaming/tagging a snap...