1. Playing Photo Slide Shows from the Shell
One last thing you can do from the shell is display
very simple photo slide shows via the Slide Show toolbar button that
you'll see in the Pictures Library and other photo-containing folders.
These slide shows are pretty basic and cannot be configured in any
meaningful way. There's no navigational UI, so to access the few
configurable options—Play/Pause, Next, Back, Shuffle, Loop, and slide
show speed (see Figure 1)—you have to right-click. You can also use the arrow keys as Back and Forward buttons, or tap Esc to exit at any time.
NOTE
If your mouse has Back and Forward buttons, you can also use them to navigate through the slide show.
The Slide Show button appears in any folder that
contains pictures. This includes the Pictures library, of course, as
well as any subfolders that are displayed within this library.
NOTE
If you just tap Slide Show without
selecting any pictures, the slide show will include all of the pictures
in the current windows as well as those in any subfolders. To restrict
the slide show to a subset of pictures, simply multi-select individual
pictures and/or folders and then tap the Slide Show button.
2. Using Photo Gallery to Manage Digital Videos
Although the name Windows Live Photo Gallery
suggests that this application is suitable only for pictures, it can
also be used to manage digital videos as well. This actually makes
sense: today, most digital cameras and many cell phones include video
recording capabilities as well, and short videos created on these
devices are already far more common than video shot with traditional
video cameras.
Videos can be viewed in Photo Gallery by selecting
All photos and videos, My Videos, or Public Videos in the Navigation
pane, or any other video-related node you may have configured. This is
shown in Figure 2.
By default, videos appear as thumbnails that provide
a glimpse into the contained movie. If you double-click a video in
Photo Gallery, the application switches into a special video preview
mode so you can watch the movie, as shown in Figure 3.
(Conversely, when you open a movie file from the Windows shell, it
typically opens in Windows Media Player.) In this mode, the
application's navigational control changes to add Play and Stop
buttons, like a video player.
Even though the Photo Gallery toolbar doesn't change
when you view videos or video previews, some options simply aren't
available with videos. For example, the Fix menu returns a simple
message, "Video files can't be fixed using Photo Gallery," if you try
to access it.
Videos are fully compatible with the tag, rating,
and caption metadata types that are utilized by pictures. This means
that you can easily add this information to your videos, filter the
view, and search for specific video content just as you do with
pictures. Again, this makes sense given that most of the videos you
have on your PC have likely come from a digital camera.
