The following info was previously posted
by Yves...maybe it will offer some ideas also:

=====
When you rearrange your thumbnails by drag and drop they will stay in
the
order and the slide show will play them in this order. However, if you
close
the folder and open it again you will find that your rearrangement is
lost.
This is because any software open files in numerical/alphabetical order.
To change this, you can rename the files so they open in the order you
want.
You make the arrangement you want in your folder.
You select all the pictures in the folder (hold the Ctrl key down and
press
the letter A). All the photos are now highlitghted.
Right click on the FIRST photo in the folder.
Click on Rename on the opening menu.
Change the name of the file to something you can recognized, say:
2002Christmas (1).jpg
Note that there is a space between the s and (
and that .jpg must be there.
Now, you press Enter.
All the files will be renamed automatically:
2002Christmas (1).jpg
2002Christmas (2).jpg
etc. in the order you placed your thumbnails.
They will now open in this order in any software

Now you can push this trick further.
Suppose you have pictures of Christmas, New Year and Easter in the same
folder and you want to display them in that order for a slide show but
you
still want to recognize them as Chistmas, NewYear and Easter by file
name.
You select all the Chistmas pictures, after arranging them in the order
you
want, right click on the first one and rename it
1_2002Christmas (1).jpg and press Enter
You do the same for New Year and rename
2_2002NewYear (1).jpg and press Enter
You do the same for Easter and rename
3_2002Easter (1).jpg and press Enter
Close the folder and open it again to verify your new order.
The order will be Christmas, NewYear, Easter instead of Christmas,
Easter,
NewYear if you had just renamed Christmas (1).jpg NewYear (10.jpg and
Easter
(1).jpg
Since you can rename a group of files any time you want you can change
the
order again as you add new pictures in this folder. Simple to remember,
files are sorted in numerical order first and then alphabetical order,
so
just use numbers in front.
====


> DaveC wrote:
>> I manually filled in some subjects and keywords for
>> individual images. However, when I go back and click the
>> details view of files in a folder (and display columns
>> with subject and keyword details) my manually entered
>> SUBJECT data appears but there is nothing under the
>> KEYWORDS column. Is this a bug? I have XP Pro.
> ========================================
> My keywords don't show in the column either
> but I am able to search for them. Sorry...I have
> no explanation for that.
> ========================================
>> I would like to use Windows Picture and Fax viewer as a
>> simple way of doing a slide show on my computer.
>> However, I can't figure out how to control the order in
>> which the slides are shown. I can sort the images on the
>> basis of information in one of the detail columns, such
>> as the date/time picture was taken. But I would like
>> more custom control. I could manually enter slide order
>> as a number under "subject" and then sort on subject
>> prior to running the slide show - but that takes a lot of
>> work and order changes would be tedious. Any ideas?
> =========================================
> Try opening your folder in the Filmstrip View
> and left click/drag the files into the order you like.
>
> After you arrange the images the way you want
> them, WinXP can batch re-number them. Just
> select all the images and then right click the
> "first one" and choose Rename. (If you prefer
> not to rename your original files...just make
> a new folder and copy your images into it)
>
> Birthday (1).jpg
>
> windows will re-number the rest.....
>
> Birthday (1).jpg
> Birthday (2).jpg
> Birthday (3).jpg



--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375