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Managing your Photos with Windows Vista

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I have over 2 years' worth of digital camera photos taken from events and travels -- managing that with Windows XP is next to impossible outside organizing them in folders by date. Windows Vista right out of the box offers incredible ways to manage your digital photos using Windows Photo Gallery -- so I can now organize my photos exactly the way I want.

Import and Fix Your Photos

Windows Photo Gallery gives you full control over your photos. Import your photos from your camera or scanner and "fix" them directly within Windows Photo Gallery. Crop your photos or fix "red-eye" or adjust the coloring. Let’s say I want to crop a picture I took from my recent vacation to Greece:

 

What if I don’t like the changes I've made to a photo? Windows Photo Gallery allows you to "roll back" to the original file by choosing the "Revert to Original" command. This way you can make sure you adjust your photos to exactly the way you want them, and are free make any and all changes you may wish to, and recover from those changes you don't wish to apply.

Tag Your Photos With Information

Windows Vista allows for extensive file tagging to organize files, and Windows Photo Gallery takes full advantage of this. Add captions to your photos or tag the files themselves very easily in Windows Photo Gallery. All you have to do is click "Info" on the top toolbar after selecting the desired photo to which you’d like to add information.

You can add as many tags as you’d like to any given photo. Here I’ve added three tags. Once you add tags and a caption to your photo, those settings stick with that specific photo in Windows Photo Gallery and throughout Windows Vista. If you browse to that photo in Windows Explorer, Windows Vista’s enhanced shell will display the tags, ratings and captions you've set in Windows Photo Gallery. Tagging your files also provides faster search results for the specific types of photos you’re looking for.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my two-part post on managing your photos with Windows Photo Gallery.  In the meantime, you can also check out the Microsoft Photography Blog and get the low-down from the team that brought you Windows Photo Gallery.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Yes I think the new photo tagging is great, although I have one question. Does adding a tag to a *.jpeg photo reduce its quality at all?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Can you apply GPU-accelerated Core Image type effects?

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    newscientist2000, adding tags to your photos, including .jpg files does not reduce the quality of the images.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    thomthom, I suggest reading this post by the Photo and Imaging Experience Team: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx They explain in the above post how Metadata is used and what file formats don't support metadata write-back (such as .PNG). In my experience - most of my digital camera photos are in jpeg and retain their tags and metadata when transferring them from one Vista machine to another.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Hey someone:  we do apply GPU-accelerated effects when processing images.  All of the "fix" operations in Easel Viewer are GPU-accelerated, with the exception of the auto-detection functions (although the settings they determine are applied using the GPU if one is present).

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    What happends to photo edits and metadata when the file is being copied? Is it lost or maintained?