Hives(?) Photos, Day 2

Today I touched base with Dozer's regular vet over the phone, to update him on Dozer's progress after yesterday's hive outbreak: less itching, but the rash is spreading out and darkening.

Much to my dismay, our seasoned vet admitted that he has really not seen any dog with hives that present quite like this. He told me that he definitely wanted Dozer's dermatology vet to see this particular reaction. Perhaps it really won't impress the dermatology vet, he said, but it definitely left an impression on him.

Not quite what I wanted to hear from a very experienced guy that rarely seems fazed by anything.

The dermatology vet has never seen Big D's hives, or the aftermath. She has always told us to go to the regular vet. And after talking to the regular vet today, I realized the derm vet was probably passing us off because I keep calling this event "hives"—normal, boring, highly treatable, common old hives—which is a little different from "freakish burning red-purple lumpy rash covering his entire body," thus leaving her with the wrong impression about this event.

Anyway, here is day 2 of the "hives" (or whatever this is)—12 hours after Benadryl and cortisone injections. Note the worst areas, where the skin has turned a disturbing green-gray. Do any of you know why it would turn that color? I'm very curious about what is happening under the skin to make it such a sickly color.

Doesn't he look downright contagious? My mom came over and she was scared to touch him because she thought he had a communicable disease.

I'm sure it's an allergic reaction; I'm just not sure why it's so... gross.

How to Organize Photos?

Here's a question for the folks who have a zillion photos on their computer.

What's the easiest, fastest way to organize them? (I have Windows XP and Vista.)

My now-dead disk drive had a LOT more pictures than I thought. I spent hours last night moving all the photos into my Photo folder on my desktop.

Right now, I have them all parceled out into folders, though the organization is not uniform at all. Some pictures are in folders based on the year ("1987"). Some are in folders based on the topic ("Pets"), then usually separated into subtopics, sub-subtopics, and quite possibly even dates from there. Some are labeled based on where I got them from ("Scans," "From camera," "From phone," etc.). And there's also a giant "Misc" folder that has another kajillion pictures sort of randomly crammed in it.

It's hard to search for a particular photo. Some of the pictures are actually named based on the subject shown. Others are named based on the date the picture was taken. And the most recent pictures still bear their camera-imposed number.

My sister recommends dumping all my pictures into one folder and using Windows Photo Gallery (which comes with Vista) to slap tags on each picture.

Which is fine, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort. So I want to be sure that's the best thing to do, before I do it.

How do you organize your digital photos? Do you use a special program, and if so, which one?

Tell me your secrets, or the puppy gets it!!