There are a lot of little gems sprinkled in Vista. If you’re on the fence about upgrading to Vista, here is another great program that comes free with it. The Vista Photo Gallery program offers a lot of features with a great, easy-to-use interface.
Number 1 - It Already Works With Your Digital Camera
I’ve plugged several digital cameras into Vista, one of them a few years old. Vista recognized them easily, with no extra software to install. It is very convenient to actually connect the camera to any Vista PC, with ever having to install any extra software that might alter the configuration.
Number 2 - Organization
After Vista scans your camera’s memory card, it automatically organizes photos by the date they are taken. This is just the first step in viewing the photos you want to view, in the way you want to view.
Number 3 - Tags
Don’t you wish you could see just your vacation photos? Or maybe just the photos of your kids? Perhaps, all the photos of your kids while on vacation? As you peruse your fond photographic images, you can simply “tag” each photo with the label “kids” and/or “vacation.” You can create as many tags as you want. Then simply assign the tag or tags to the photos. As you select the name of the tag from the master list, all of the corresponding photos are quickly displayed.
These tags are embedded within the photo, so if you e-mail them, others benefit from your work. When they add the photo to their computer, Vista will use and organize the photo by the same tags.
I’ll tag these photos of my son in the garden with “Flowers” and “Jackson”
Number 4 - Fix Your Photos
The dreaded red eye in a photograph is best explained here. To avoid dealing with this issue at the Target photo printing kiosk, simple fix it yourself. Just select the photo and choose Fix > Fix Red Eye. It’s fast and effective. You can crop the image from the same area, which can really improve the aesthetics of the photograph.
Number 5 - You’ll Actually Be Able To Find Your Photos
As you review your favorite photos, you’ll probably want to record some fond memories of the event. When you select one or more photos, you can also add a caption by clicking on Info > Caption.
Best of all, you can then search your entire photo library for that caption. As you enter text in the search field, your entire library of photos is filtered based on the text you provide. This is a great way to view the handful of images you really want, across a collection of thousands. From there, you can always sub filter based on tags you have assigned.
Note my search for the word “pink”
There is a lot more as well. You can also assign a one- to five-star rating to your photos. Your photos look great in Microsoft Media Center for running a slideshow on your TV. The photo slideshows can run based on the tags you selected as well. Finally, everything I’ve said about photos can also be done with video clips. All this takes a little time and effort, but the payoff is great.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:57 am
Don’t forget the slide shows have been improved with some themes. There is also the slider to change the pictures you are looking at in a folder from just file information up to large size picture.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:37 am
That’s a good point.
Another nice feature is that you can right click and change the time the photo was taken. Very handy for those daylight saving times changes and “midnight” problems (when the clock resets).