Perfect pictures every time!

A few decades from now, the 35mm film cameras we grew up with will be truly forgotten about. And good riddance! Digital photography has transformed our lives and the power inside your Windows Vista PC will keep that momentum shifting forwards with Windows Photo Gallery.

Can’t remember what year, month or even the day you took that shot of the kids at the park? Windows has it sorted. Want to instantly find your favourite pictures? No worries. Exposure a little dark? Yup, that’s no problem too. Windows Photo Gallery will turn you into that pro snapper you’ve always wanted to be…

Adding tags

So you’re back from your hols and it’s time to save all those amazing pictures you’ve taken. That could be a couple of hundred shots, so thank goodness Windows Vista automatically sticks your pictures neatly in a subfolder within your Pictures folder after you’ve connected the camera.

The power of Windows Photo Gallery becomes apparent when you get the option to tag pictures as they’re imported. This adds a plain English description to your photos that allows you to organise and find them while using Windows Vista.

So let’s say you’ve just returned from two weeks in the Algarve and are importing your holiday photos. Choosing ‘holiday’ as a tag during import will attach the word to all the images. Clicking on Recently Added Files will show the pictures you’ve just imported, where you can add more tags using the Add Tags feature on the right-hand Info pane. Tagging ‘Algarve’ to them all would be useful, as that’s where they were taken.

From then on you can add loads of other tags to individual pictures, such as family members’ names or famous landmarks you visited. After next year’s holiday there’s no need to go typing in ‘holiday’ again as you can drag your images over the ‘holiday’ tag in the Navigator pane. Tagging this way, with simple keywords, will help to future-proof your picture collection as it increases over the years, and will help you search for all your holiday snaps.

Browsing brilliance

Windows Photo Gallery isn’t just for importing movies or photos, either. Maybe you’re using a Windows Vista laptop but have a massive library of images stored on a desktop PC? With a wireless network you can still browse and use the images by clicking the File tab in the top bar and Add Folder to Gallery.

You’re not able to edit them (unless they’re stored in a shared folder) but it’s great for outputting them to print, web, burning or just browsing. And browsing is such a breeze. The Thumbnail box below the Top Bar is where you can control the way you want to view, sort and group your pictures while the Zoom function in the Slide Show controls adjusts the size of thumbnails so you can easily check the composition and exposure.

Probably the most powerful feature is the ability to organise and view your photos using the Navigator pane by date, star rating, folders and most importantly, tags. Dragging and dropping one tag over another places it into a subfolder. So you have an organised Navigator pane whereby all your holiday tags – for example ‘Tuscany’ and ‘Algarve’ – are neatly contained within your ‘holiday’ tag.

Tweak, crop and fix

No picture is ever finished without some form of editing. Highlighting an image and clicking the Fix button brings up five adjustment options. Although the Auto Adjust does a fair job, have a go at manual for full control.

Whacking up the Contrast or Brightness using the Adjust Exposure button instantly improves a bad or flat exposure along with Saturation in the Adjust Colour menu. While you’re in there, have a fiddle with the Colour Temperature and Tint sliders: increasing the Colour Temperature gives your images a warm and appealing hue. You can try all this without destroying your original picture by using the Undo feature at the bottom of the Adjustment pane. Even after saving your image, by clicking Back to Gallery in the top left you can still return to the original picture years later by opening it in Fix and clicking Revert.

There’s an option to edit your pictures in Microsoft’s Paint program, but installing third-party photo-editing software is a better option. Click the Open button in the top bar w
hile browsing and choosing the editing software.

Find an audience

Getting your photos seen by others is very much on the menu in Windows Vista. Printing is easier than ever, with options ranging from full-page pictures to a contact sheet. Windows Photo Gallery makes online printing so painless it may soon be your first choice, especially when most online print stores can slap your pictures onto anything from T-shirts to mouse mats.

For showing granny in Canada her granddaughter’s first Christmas, email is usually the best method, and Windows Photo Gallery does this for you without going through the rigmarole of having to open your email, browse to where the file is stored and attach it – only to find it’s too big and you need to resize. One click on the Email button and you get to choose the physical size of photos you want to send, before opening your email program, creating a new message and attaching them.

An even more convenient and hassle-free way to share pictures around the world is to use an online picture hosting service, such as Windows Live Spaces or Flickr. Once you’ve signed up for an account, uploading is quick, easy and all taken care of by the hosting web site. Sites such as Flickr use the same tag system featured in Windows Photo Gallery, so when your pictures are on the site they’re easily searchable by the tags you’ve already attached.

If your picture presentation requires a little more refinement then clicking the Burn button in the top bar and selecting Video DVD will open the wizard to walk you through making a truly professional-looking DVD-style slideshow, with menus that work on DVD players or an Xbox. Open the pictures you want to include by clicking the Make a Movie button in Windows Photo Gallery.

Remember, you can use most of the amazing features in Windows Photo Gallery for your home movie clips too, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft has taken the clever decision to throw them both in the same melting pot, where the image (moving or still) really is everything.