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Organise your photo collection in Windows Vista

The digital camera revolution has freed us from the tedium and expense of developing film. In doing so, it has given us the power to fire off as many shots as we like until we get that one great picture that perfectly captures a mood, reveals a person’s character or creates an image just the way we had it in our heads. Taking great photos still isn’t easy, but with trial, effort and patience you can do it. Finding them on your hard drive, on the other hand, can be a lot tougher.

I’ve been taking digital photos for about five years now. Although I periodically clean down my hard drive by archiving all my images on to DVD, I’m back up to about 25GB of disk space in my Pictures folder already, and adding more each day. That’s a lot of photos to sort through every time I want to find a particular shot. I’ve tried many programs for categorising my photos and keeping track of them, and while several of them have had their good points, they all have faults – the most common being that they leave me little control over which folders they’re monitoring and why. Because of this, the browsing convenience they offer hasn’t been quite enough to justify using them over old fashioned Windows Explorer.

With Windows Vista, however, all the tools I need for keeping track of my shots and sorting them are there at my fingertips. The difference is apparent as soon as you plug a camera, mobile phone or memory card into your PC. A dialogue box pops up and asks if you want to transfer the shots from your camera on to your PC. Once you’ve agreed to this, Windows Vista presents you with the option to add a ‘tag’ (or keyword) to the images you’re transferring. So if, say, you’ve just got back from Land’s End and all your shots are of dark Cornish cliffs, you might want to say something about that here.

By default, Windows Vista will then transfer all the files over to your Pictures folder, storing them in a subfolder named by the day of the transfer and the tag you’ve chosen – for example, the automatically generated folder might be called ‘10-Dec-2006 Land’s End’. You’ll also find that all the photos in the set have been renamed from the usual gibberish (such as ‘DSC03415.jpg’) to the rather more meaningful ‘Land’s End 1.jpg’ and ‘Land’s End 2.jpg’ and so on.

Where you take control

The heart of the new photography toolkit, though, is the Windows Photo Gallery application. It monitors the contents of your pictures folder – and any other folders you ask it to, including those on external hard drives – and presents you with an Explorer type thumbnail view of all the photos and videos stored there. You can alter the view to include bits of info attached to the image but normally hidden, including the name, time taken and any tags or keywords assigned.

I Am Undone – You can always revert to ‘as taken’

This is where you can really start to take control of your photo collection. The panel on the right shows a variety of sorting tools – you can sort images by name, date taken, location on the hard drive, tag, star rating, or by clicking on the Recently Imported items to see only images taken from the camera in the last 30 days. On the far left-hand side is the ‘metadata’ (hidden info) for the selected image, and you can edit information such as name, time, date and caption.

Watch the Berdie – Brighten dull images at preview

If you select more than one shot and edit the information here, Windows Vista will apply the metadata to every file selected. Most importantly, if you rename a group of files it will add a consecutive number to each one – so I can quickly change my photo library from a rather random collection of files with arbitrary names to one which is sorted meaningfully and with usable tags.

One Touch – Auto adjust is good at picking up colours

My favourite feature of all, though, is being able to select multiple photos and drag them over a tag in the left hand pane – adding that tag to each shot in the selection. One of the most powerful sorting tools is the Star Rating. Once you’ve imported your images to your PC and edited the tags and names in Photo Gallery, you can scroll over them in the centre panel for an enlarged preview, or double-click on them to open them in a viewing window. Shots can then be given a rating from 0 to 5, a great way to single out the ones that you want to keep for posterity, without deleting anything. You can then find the best images quickly by clicking the rating you want to browse in the left-hand panel. Since I started using it, I’ve been discovering great photos from years ago that I’d forgotten I’d even taken.

Filed for the future

The suite is rounded off with some basic editing tools. What stands out about these is the ease with which you can use them. Simply click Fix and drag the Exposure slider to bring light where once was only darkness, or hit Auto Adjust to have Photo Gallery run it through the system for you. That one click can transform indistinct blobs into stunning family shots – perfect for those of us whose photography skills have still got a bit of room to develop. And no matter how long you’ve been using a digital camera, that’s probably true of all of us.

Take the shot

The most important thing about creating a good photo gallery is taking a good picture in the first place. There are lots of great photography websites offering tips on improving your technique. Try checking out www.dcmag.co.uk for inspiration.

Transfer Across

When you come to download your images to your computer, a card reader is the easiest way of getting shots across. Failing that, just plug your camera in. Windows Vista will recognise the images, and ask you if you want to transfer them.

Raw Meat

At the time of writing, Photo Gallery can’t read camera RAW files, but all the camera manufacturers are working on software to add this in, which will automatically be downloaded on release. In the meantime, you’ll have to use JPGs or TIFF files for pictures.

Tag Lines

Adding a tag at this point will rename your images, and will file them in a folder using the same label. You can change how Windows Vista handles the transfer by clicking on the Options button. Check the Erase after importing box to keep your camera card clean.

Into The Gallery

Now open up Windows Photo Gallery. Your pictures will be there, renamed and tagged. You can do an initial sort through by rating each image from one to five stars, and then pare down your collection ready for browsing or sharing.

Adam Oxford contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, and is a veteran technology journalist.

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Get pictures off a camera in Windows Vista

In addition to working with existing images, Windows Photo Gallery can transfer and organise the pictures on your digital camera or memory card. You can do this by connecting the camera directly to your PC, usually via a USB cable, or by using a USB card reader. We’ve gone for the latter option – we’ve got a number of digital cameras and cameraphones and we lost the cables a long time ago – but both methods work in the same way.

Instance Access

As soon as you connect your camera or card reader, Windows Vista will ask what you want to do – so you can import the pictures or just view them. We’ll go for the first option because we want our pics on our PC.

Tag time

You’ll now be asked whether you want to tag your pictures. You don’t have to give them tags but we’d recommend it.

One or many

We’ve just used one tag here but you can use as many as you like. When you’ve got a digital camera it won’t take long to build a library containing thousands of images, so tagging will make finding specific photos much easier.

Progress Report

The progress bar will now show the import progress. If you check the “Erase after importing” button then Windows Vista will clear your camera’s memory or memory card. If this is the first time you’ve tried to import pictures, it’s sensible to leave the box unchecked for now.

Instant album

When the final photo has been transferred the Windows Photo Gallery will appear. Your pictures will be in a new, dedicated album and you can also view them by clicking the Recently Imported link at the top left.

Easy edits

As with other images, double-clicking on a picture opens it so you can view it, add tags, print it or edit it. We’ve just got one problem: our photo’s sideways. To rotate an image use the two rotate buttons in the toolbar at the bottom of the window.

This way up

That’s much better. If you click on Back To Gallery at the top of the screen, Windows Photo Gallery will automatically save the changes to your image.

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Tag, organise, filter and fix your digital photos in Windows Vista

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has taken Windows XP’s photo organising features, sent them to the gym, made them eat their greens, put them through finishing school and then given them a makeover. In other words, the Windows Vista Photo Gallery is really rather good. When you first run Windows Vista you’ll find it pinned to the Start menu; if you’ve been using Vista for a while then it’s only an extra click away (Start > All Programs > Windows Photo Gallery).

Everything everywhere

The first time you run the Photo Gallery it’ll show every kind of image and video in your folders. If you click on the Thumbnail View icon to the left of the search box you can change the view, for example by getting Windows Vista to sort or group your images by date, size or other criteria.

No clips

While it’s handy to see video and photos together, sometimes – like now – you might not be interested in video. No problem: at the top left of the window just click on Pictures.

Photo Gallery will now show your images but not your video clips.

Tag views

You can also filter the list by tags (as we’ve done here), star ratings or date by clicking on the appropriate links in the left hand of the screen. In this screenshot we’re only looking at pictures that we’ve tagged with our dog’s name.

Big picture

To see an image in all its glory, double-click on it. You’ll see that at the right of the screen you can add tags, change the star rating or add a caption.

Easy edit

You can fix common image problems from within the Photo Gallery. Click on the Fix toolbar button and you’ll see five options at the right: auto adjust, adjust exposure, adjust color, crop picture and fix red eye.

Auto adjust

If you click on Auto Adjust the Photo Gallery attempts to make the colours in your photo as accurate as possible. You’ll see that ticks now appear next to Auto Adjust and Adjust Color so you can see at a glance what changes have been made. You can click Undo at any time if you change your mind.

Bright ideas

Click on the Adjust Exposure link to adjust the image’s brightness and contrast. You can now use the sliders to make the image brighter or to boost the contrast (the difference between the brightest and darkest bits of the image).

Quick fix

As you adjust the sliders you’ll see the results instantly. In this example we’ve gone for a fairly extreme adjustment that almost gets rid of the image background.

Quick crop

Photo Gallery also enables you to crop images, which is handy if – as in this example – the interesting bit of the image could be made bigger. Simply click on Crop Picture and then either choose from one of the drop-down options – useful if you want to crop your picture to fit a particular paper size – or use the mouse to crop the image manually. Click on Apply to make the changes.

Bigger picture

Here you can see the results of our crop. It’s a good way of removing unnecessary bits from a photo, and there’s an Undo button if you get carried away and crop more than you intended to.

Print your pics

You can print photos from within Photo Gallery. Click on the image you want to print and then click on the Print toolbar button. Choose Print… and you’ll see the dialogue box shown here, which enables you to change the paper size, selected printer, print quality or page layout.

Easy albums

If you’re printing multiple photos at once, try experimenting with the different page layouts along the right-hand side of the dialogue box. These enable you to print images in a variety of ways – two to a page, four to a page, nine to a page and so on – and Windows Vista automatically resizes the images so the results are perfect.

Advanced options

Click on the Options link to see more features. By default the Photo Gallery sharpens images to make them as clear as possible, although you can turn this option off if you prefer. For serious printing, for example where the colours on the page have to match the colours on screen exactly, you can click on Color Management to calibrate your monitor and printer for accurate colour reproduction.

Easy CD

If you want to share your photos with others you can email them by clicking on the Email toolbar button, but if you’ve got lots of high resolution images then a CD or DVD is a better b
et. You don’t need separate software to burn a disc: simply select the images you want to copy to disc and then click on Burn in the toolbar. And that’s it.

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