Secrets of Syncing, Streaming and Organizing

Don't mess with codecs: If you're tired of installing and updating audio and video codecs to extend your player's capabilities, make VLC your main media player. Easily the most compatible media player available, VLC can handle a multitude of file and streaming formats designed for iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, and more.
Prevent stream stutter: Though many factors outside your control could interrupt your video stream (especially if you're streaming from another user's PC rather than from a dedicated service such as Netflix or YouTube), one tweak that may help is to increase the size of your system's read buffer. This adjustment will make the stream take longer to start, but it can also smooth out some hiccups by introducing a little more latency.
In VLC, open the Open Network Stream menu, check Show more options, and bump up the number in the Caching field. In Windows Media Player, choose Options from the Organize menu, click the Performance tab, and manually adjust the ‘Buffering settings'.
Accelerate or slow down podcasts: If you want to play back your audiobooks and podcasts in Windows Media Player at a different speed from the one they were set to play at, you can arrange it instantly via a few keyboard shortcuts. Press Ctrl-Shift-G to make a podcast play faster, press Ctrl-Shift-S to slow it down, and press Ctrl-Shift-N to reset it to normal.
Automate photo uploads: Depending on which photo management software and online photo services you prefer, you may be able to upload new pictures automatically.
LiveUpload to Facebook can publish from Windows Live Gallery, while Picasa can post anything you put in a Picasa Web Album on the Picasa Website. If you favor Flickr, try Foldr Monitr, which can watch a specific folder for newly added images and post them to your Flickr account.
(For more on automating your media collection, see "Automate Your PC's Media Library.")
Tag photos from Windows: If you have a lot of photos on your PC, you'll probably want to organize them with a photo gallery app (such as Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picasa). But if you don't want to deal with an extra application, you can use Windows 7's built-in metadata support to maintain order among your photos by means of descriptive tags ("Kids" or "Vacation," for example).
Just select the pictures in Windows Explorer, click Show More Details... at the bottom of the open window, click Tags, and type the tags you want to use (separate multiple tags with semicolons). Once you've tagged your photos, you can search for them by placing "tag:" in front of your search string.