If you were a fan of the shell-based photo
management features in Windows XP, you might be somewhat disappointed
that Microsoft removed a lot of that functionality from Windows Vista
and Windows 7. But fear not: those features—and many more—are now
available in the new Windows Live Photo Gallery. This easy-to-use
application provides a single location from which you can organize,
edit, and share your digital memories. And in an interesting twist,
Windows Live Photo Gallery can even manage digital videos as well,
despite its name.
1. First Things First
The first time you run Windows Live Photo Gallery, a
couple of things will happen that are worth discussing before we get
into actual application usage.
First, you will be asked to sign into your Windows Live ID account, as shown in Figure 1.
Doing so plugs you into the wider family of Windows Live online
services and provides for some nice integration between this
application and other Windows Live applications and services.
You can use Windows Live Photo Gallery without
making this connection, but if think you may want to publish your
photos to Windows Live Photos or Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces
blogging service, it's worth doing.
Next, Windows Live Photo Gallery will ask you if you
would like to use this application to open common image file
formats—instead of Windows 7's built-in Windows Photo Viewer (see Figure 2).
We recommend using Windows Live Photo Gallery, and not Windows Photo
Viewer, because the former application has so many more useful features.
Okay, now it's time take a lap around the Photo Gallery interface.
2. Examining the Windows Live Photo Gallery User Interface
Windows Live Photo Gallery utilizes the now familiar
Windows 7 application style, with a simple, light-blue colored user
interface and no visible menus, as shown in Figure 3.
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If you're familiar with Microsoft's now-discontinued
Digital Image Suite product line, you might find that Windows Live
Photo Gallery looks and works similarly to Digital Image Suite Library.
That's by design: Windows Live Photo Gallery offers a compelling subset
of the features from Digital Image Suite, now available free.
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The Windows Live Photo Gallery user interface is
divided into just a few main sections. Between the toolbar and
bottom-mounted navigational controls, you'll see two areas, or panes,
by default: a Navigation pane on the left that determines which photos
(or videos) you will view, and the thumbnail pane, which displays the
pictures (or videos) in the current view.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery displays other panes
under certain conditions. If you view a single image with the
application or click the Info button in the toolbar, a right-mounted
Info pane appears, providing information about the current picture.
When you choose to edit an image—called Fix—a Fix pane appears with
various editing options. We'll examine these functions in just a bit.
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You may be wondering how Windows Live Photo Gallery
aggregates the picture files found on your PC. Does it integrate with
the Windows 7 HomeGroup feature? Access the same locations as your
Pictures and Videos libraries? Or does it search your entire PC for
content? Actually, it does none of those, betraying its pre-Windows 7
roots.
Instead, it simply looks in four locations by
default. These locations happen to be the same ones that are aggregated
by your Pictures and Videos libraries—your My Pictures and My Videos
folders, and the Public Pictures and Public Videos folders—but that's
more coincidence than anything. It's just that Windows Live Photo
Gallery—which is also designed to work with Windows XP and Vista—is
designed that way.
That said, you don't have to accept the
application's defaults. You can add photos manually to the Windows Live
Photo Gallery library by dragging them from the shell into the
application. Or, you could simply add other folders to the Windows Live
Photo Gallery list of watched folders. We show you how in the next
section, but if you're familiar with the notion of Windows Media Player
monitored folders, the concept here is similar.
What about picture file type support? Obviously,
Windows Live Photo Gallery supports common image file types such as
JPEG, (non-animated) GIF, PNG, TIFF, and Bitmap. Newer digital cameras
support various RAW file types, which are uncompressed, and
unfortunately Windows Live Photo Gallery cannot edit RAW images out of
the box. But if you install a compatible Windows Imaging Components
(WIC) driver from a camera maker, Windows Live Photo Gallery will allow
you to edit RAW images and export them to JPEG. It cannot save edits
directly to any RAW image
