If you need to select some of your images, to create an anthology according to subject or quality, etc, and you have a lot of them, the task can be time consuming – e.g. you have to open an image in a viewer, decide if you want it in your anthology, then drag it with the mouse and drop it to a separate folder, then return to the viewer and continue to the next image, etc.

There is an easier way to do your selections.

1 – Open the Windows “Recycle Bin” and empty it, then open the folder where your images reside.
2 – Open one of your images in the “Windows Picture and Fax viewer”.
3 – Move to the previous or next image by pressing PageUp or PageDown.
4 – Delete any image you don’t want in your anthology, by pressing the “Delete” button while the image is displayed in the Viewer. All the images you delete go automatically to the “Recycle Bin”.
5 – Continue until you have deleted all the images that you don’t want in your anthology.
6 – When you have finished deleting all the unwanted images, select all the images that remain in your folder and move them to a new folder. Give to this folder a name that describes your anthology, e.g. My Best Photos, etc.
7 – Go to the Recycle Bin and restore all the deleted images to their initial folder.

That’s it.

Please note that “Windows Picture and Fax viewer” lacks an important feature, it does not provide the option of full-screen browsing, and it does not stretch the images to fit the desktop. Without these options, if you need, e.g. to select some of your images in order to use them as Wallpapers, you can not see how they look like when they are stretched to fit the desktop, – if their quality drops or if the resizing distorts the subject too much, etc.

If you want to browse your pictures stretched to fit the whole desktop in order to decide what to choose, you can use IrfanView.

Irfan View provides a full screen mode to browse images, including several options (keep original size, stretch only large images, stretch all images, etc). The moment you see an image you can press the Delete button to send it to the Recycle Bin (just as in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer). Therefore, you can follow the same steps as above to make your selections, using IrfanView instead of the native Windows Picture and Fax Viewer – if you need to see the images stretched to fit the desktop.

Note, that in IrfanView by default when you delete an image the display is not updated automatically with the next image of the folder. The deleted image still appears on the  screen until you move to the next image by pressing the PageDown button. To change this go to Settings – File Handling and enable the option “Jump to the next file after deleting/moving”.