4. Changing How Your Digital Memories Are Displayed
Photo Gallery is a fairly versatile application. In
the Navigation pane, you can choose to filter the view of photos and
videos by various criteria. The top option, or node, is called All
Photos and Videos. This entry lets you view all of the photos and
videos you have in the My Pictures, Public Pictures, My Videos, and
Public Videos folders (by default).
If you want to filter the view down a bit, you can
expand and contract the various nodes found in the Navigation pane. For
example, if you expand All Photos and Videos, you'll see subnodes in
the tree for My Pictures, My Videos, Public Pictures, and Public
Videos. Choosing one of those will filter the Thumbnail pane to show
only the content in the selected folder. Other nodes in the Navigation
pane include Date Taken, People Tags, and Descriptive Tags.
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The Folders nodes provide you with a close
approximation to the old XP-style shell management. When you expand
these nodes, you'll see a cascading set of folders representing the
folders that Photo Gallery watches for new content.
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NOTE
Although it's not obvious at all, you can
actually add or remove folders from the list of folders that Windows
Live Photo Gallery watches. To add a folder, simply navigate to that
folder in an Explorer window and then drag it over to the Folders node.
To remove a folder, including one of the default folders, right-click
it inside of the Photo Gallery View By pane and choose delete. Be very
careful here: when you delete a folder in this fashion, you are also
deleting the original, so you will also delete the actual pictures as
well. This is poor design on Microsoft's part, in our opinion.
As is often the case with any tree control–type user
interface, the Navigation pane can grow beyond the bounds of the
application window quite easily, especially if you've got a large image
library with a lot of folders or tags. In such a case, the pane adopts
a scrollbar so you can still access all of your pictures by navigating
up and down through the list.
4.4.1. Grouping and Arranging in Photo Gallery
The thumbnail pane supports a number of
organizational features that will be familiar to you if you've spent
time playing around with similar features in the Windows shell . In fact, these features were
clearly inspired by the Windows 7 shell.
The various organizational features are located
below the toolbar and above the thumbnail pane. From left to right,
these include the following:
Arrange By:
As with the Windows shell, Photo Gallery sports a handy way to arrange
the items you're viewing. The default view is auto, which displays
standard thumbnails in ascending order, with the oldest pictures at the
top. However, you can click the Arrange By control to show different
arrangements, including by Name, Date, Rating, Type, Tag, or Person.
But here's where Photo Gallery wildly differs from the Windows 7 shell:
instead of arranging the pictures into stacks, Photo Gallery instead segregates the pictures vertically into groups, as shown in Figure 6. These groups can be expanded and collapsed to save space. In Figure 7, you can see a few collapsed groups.
Arrange Order:
As you can in the shell, you can also order arranged items in either
ascending or descending order. For example, if you choose Arrange By
and then Date, and then use a descending arrange order, images will be
displayed with the most recent images at the top. In ascending order,
the oldest images will be shown at the top. Filter By:
To the right of Arrange By and Arrange Order, you will see a Filter By
control followed by a list of five grayed-out stars. This control
enables you to filter the current view by rating. To view only those
photos that are rated four stars, for example, click the fourth star
from the left. This will highlight the first four stars and, naturally,
display only the four-star-rated items, as shown in Figure 8.
You can fine-tune the filter a bit. To the
right of the stars is a link titled "only." Tap this and you can choose
"and higher" or "and lower." For example, to filter images in the
current view down to those that are rated three stars and below, you
would click the third star and then choose "and lower." Note that the Filter By link now reads "Clear filter." To remove the filter, click this link. Search:
Photo Gallery's search functionality is surprisingly complete. You can
search by all kinds of things—file name, descriptive tags, people,
date, and so on—further filtering the view. In Figure 9, you can see the results of searching for a specific tag.
In addition to these UI controls, Photo Gallery also
exposes shell-like grouping and sorting options, as well as a number of
thumbnail view styles, most of which are unique to this application.
Grouping and sorting works largely as it does in the
shell. To group thumbnails, right-click a blank area of the thumbnail
pane and then choose Group by. Photo Gallery offers a much wider range
of grouping options than does the Windows 7 shell. You can see the list
of possibilities in Figure 10.
Photo Gallery's Sort By also offers more options
than its Explorer counterpart. Here, you get Date taken, Date Modified,
File Size, Image Size, Rating, Caption, and File Name.
Finally, Photo Gallery offers a wide range of view
styles, all of which are specially tailored to photos. You access these
options by right-clicking a blank area in the thumbnail pane and then
choosing View and one of the following options:
Thumbnails: The default view, this displays just thumbnail images with no surrounding text. Thumbnails with date taken:
Here, a caption is added to the bottom of each thumbnail, describing
the date and time that each photo was taken. This is shown in Figure 11.
Thumbnails with date modified: Here, the caption reflects the date and time the underlying file was last modified. Thumbnails with file size: In this case, the thumbnail caption will display the size of the underlying file, in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). Thumbnails with image size: This refers to the dimensions of the image, in pixels. For example, you may see captions such as 3328 × 1872 or 3072 × 2304. Thumbnails with rating:
This is an excellent view style for those who want to rate their
photos. It displays five grayed-out stars as the caption for unrated
photos, or the correct rating in cases where one has been previously
supplied. Note that this caption isn't read-only: you can also click
within the stars to rate photos on-the-fly. This is shown in Figure 12.
Thumbnails with caption: This view style provides a way to view and add captions to individual photos. Thumbnails with file name:
This view style displays the photo's underlying filename as the
caption. Interestingly, you can edit it, and when you do, the
underlying filename is changed as well. Details:
The unfortunately named Details view is, in fact, the very best view
option of all. Don't be fooled by the name, as it has nothing to do
with the Details view found in the Windows shell. This is no text view.
Instead, each thumbnail is accompanied by a block of text to the right
of the thumbnail, instead of the bottom. This text includes the image's
filename, date and time taken, file size, image size (resolution),
rating, and caption, as shown in Figure 13. The date taken, time taken, rating, and caption can all be edited in this view, which makes it very handy indeed.
Regardless of which view style you prefer, you can
utilize the thumbnail resizing tool, found in the bottom right of the
application window, to adjust the size of each thumbnail. As you can
see in Figure 14, you're free to make the thumbnails as large—or small—as you want.
NOTE
You can also resize the thumbnails in Windows
Live Photo Gallery with the scroll wheel on your mouse, if you have
one: just hold down the Ctrl key and scroll. No scroll wheel–equipped
mouse? No problem: you can use the keyboard instead. Again, hold down
the Ctrl key, but this time repeatedly tap the minus (-) key to zoom
out or the plus key (+, really =) to zoom in.
Additionally, you can use the toggle to the left of
the thumbnail resizing tool to toggle between the current view and the
default thumbnails view.
NOTE
To reset the thumbnails to their default size, tap Ctrl+0.
You can also enable a little-known Table of Contents
pane from the Photo Gallery right-click menu. This adds a pane between
the Navigation pane and thumbnail pane that corresponds to the current
Group by setting. So, for example, if you're grouping by Date taken,
the Table of Contents pane will list dates. If you're grouping by
Rating, it will list ratings. The Table of Contents pane is shown in Figure 15.
Table of Contents acts like the Table of Contents in
a book, enabling you to jump from group to group quickly. Say you have
grouped by Year taken. The Table of Contents pane lists the name of
each year for which you have one or more photos. Additionally, small
blue meters below each year name visually hint at the number of
pictures for each year. As you click year names in the Table of
Contents, the Thumbnail pane scrolls down to display the corresponding
group. Also, as it scrolls, a hazy blue box appears in the Table of
Contents, visually showing you which portion of your pictures you're
currently viewing.
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