I was thinking -- that, especially w/rating, it would be real helpful if as part of the Desktop menu -- as part of the desktop drop-down, to 2 optional menu items: Rating & Tags. Clicking on Rating could open an input box to an integer value (positive or negative). Freeform input limited to an integer would allow someone to use whatever scale they wanted for a rating. (vs. being limited to 1-5 or even 1-10 -- I've never found so few options to be useful in categorizing my collections (music, video or pictures), since how much I like one object may be 2x another 10x another or 100x another. Usually, I've found that for my own collections, 1-100 usually suffices.

Could optionally store a max rating value for the scale so it would be know that 10=10/100 and not 10/5 (when only an "off-the-scale rating" will do.

The other feature that is a bit more advanced beyond that, would be a menu option to set tags on the picture.
That could range from a simple entering of tags separated by commas or semicolons, to one that also has auto-completion with its history input as previously used tags found amongst the existing pictures (or the last 10-20 tags entered, for method of supplying recent tags w/o having to tally the existing set of pics). Sometimes the last 10-20 most recently used names are stored in a registry key, for example.

Since the pics are displayed all the time anyway, being able to rate as the mood strikes one, would be a big plus. I find rating the most useful, since images can be semi/pseudo tagged by putting them in different folders associated with different tags (family, people, animals...etc).

====THEN=== (some time later)....

algorithms to select pics based on criteria -- could be added that could be specified by the user (or some stock formulae could also be used...). Examples of stock forumae:
1) show all rated 3 (/5) and above with frequency (rating-2) (ranging from 1-3 in my example) where 2 shows 2x level 1, and 3 shows 3x level 1.
2) Using a 0-100 scale, create pool of chances which goes from 0->sum("Max"*X) for each picture X,
where Max, if using some exponent growth. Lets say 2 was chosen, so chances of rating 1 being chosen would be 1*1 (1 squared) out of sum, while rating 100 would have 10,000 chances out of the total of being chosen, w/the usage of the totals either as random chances or shuffle order, OR a combination of random order and subtraction from the total (thus the algorithm would reset/refill when the total was exhausted, but in each run the random chances would be proportional to the adjusted value of a pictures "rating"/score.

Ideally, the formula's could be things specified by the user -- maybe a call-out to some language interpreter) (I favor Perl, myself -- it can be called from C or it can call C from Perl). User could provide a formula as
their own algorithm that can be read from a file and run in real-time to return orders of any sort.

Anyway -- Just adding the rating would be the first step.. and the other stuff ... if interest develops?

Hope you'll consider it! Thanks!

Astara