Managing your Photos with Windows Vista

I have over 2 years' worth of digital camera photos taken from events and travels -- managing that with Windows XP is next to impossible outside organizing them in folders by date.  Windows Vista right out of the box offers incredible ways to manage your digital photos using Windows Photo Gallery -- so I can now organize my photos exactly the way I want.

Import and Fix Your Photos

Windows Photo Gallery gives you full control over your photos.  Import your photos from your camera or scanner and "fix" them directly within Windows Photo Gallery.  Crop your photos or fix "red-eye" or adjust the coloring.  Let’s say I want to crop a picture I took from my recent vacation to Greece:

 

What if I don’t like the changes I've made to a photo?  Windows Photo Gallery allows you to "roll back" to the original file by choosing the "Revert to Original" command.  This way you can make sure you adjust your photos to exactly the way you want them, and are free make any and all changes you may wish to, and recover from those changes you don't wish to apply.

Tag Your Photos With Information

Windows Vista allows for extensive file tagging to organize files, and Windows Photo Gallery takes full advantage of this.  Add captions to your photos or tag the files themselves very easily in Windows Photo Gallery.  All you have to do is click "Info" on the top toolbar after selecting the desired photo to which you’d like to add information.

You can add as many tags as you’d like to any given photo.  Here I’ve added three tags.  Once you add tags and a caption to your photo, those settings stick with that specific photo in Windows Photo Gallery and throughout Windows Vista.  If you browse to that photo in Windows Explorer, Windows Vista’s enhanced shell will display the tags, ratings and captions you've set in Windows Photo Gallery.  Tagging your files also provides faster search results for the specific types of photos you’re looking for.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my two-part post on managing your photos with Windows Photo Gallery.  In the meantime, you can also check out the Microsoft Photography Blog and get the low-down from the team that brought you Windows Photo Gallery.

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Comments

  1. samdaye
    Posted on: August 22, 2007 at 2:11PM  

    Thank you so much bradr14!!!

    I have been looking and looking for a solution to this problem.  I work with pictures all the time and it was driving my crazy that the pictures were not opening in the "viewer".  Not sure why it changed,  but it cost me hours and hours of work!!

    Thanks again!!

  2. Face
    Posted on: August 28, 2007 at 6:33PM  

    I am getting more and more frustrated with Windows Vista, in particular Windows Photo Gallery and the rotating issues I am having with it.

    It seems on frequent occasions rotating an image corrupts the image at a random point.

    I have uploaded the photo to see if someone can shed light on the issue I am having and whether it will be fixed.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/12298550@N05/1261724418/

  3. admdiscos
    Posted on: September 04, 2007 at 10:17AM  

    I take a lot of digital photos and use Windows Photo Gallery to crop to size and rename photos. However, every so often I get the message 'Changes to this picture cannot be saved because Photo Gallery has experienced a problem'. No mention of what the problem is or how to fix it. At other times the crop frame fails to appear.

    On each occasion I have to reboot the computer. What is the problem and how can I fix it. It is not the photos as it works perfectly after rebooting, for a while anyway.

    Andy

  4. ehackster
    Posted on: September 15, 2007 at 7:56PM  

    To everyone who is complaining about the "damaged" error message.

    Go to your control panel/services and make sure that the service called "User Profile Service" is enabled and started. If not set the startup type to automatic, and reboot.

    Although not documented anywhere, Windows Photo Gallery _WILL_ fail if this service is stopped.

  5. Bernielj
    Posted on: April 06, 2008 at 8:19PM  

    With WIN98SE and with WIN-XP I had no problems with photos, as I used ULead Photo Explorer v.7.0, Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4.0, and a few other products that I can't think of the name of right now, but I liked Corel Print Office and Corel Photo House the best, and those software programs came with the digital camera, an Agfa E-Photo CL-18, but they only worked up through WIN-XP.

    Now that the new 2.4 Ghz PC came with Windows Vista Home Premium, none of these products work, and as far as Windows Photo Gallery goes, I can't even get it to "see" or detect the digital camera and I've been "fighting" this for days now.

    I'm beginning to dislike Windows Vista as the manufacturer of the digital camera doesn't even have a Windows Vista driver for it, and they're not going to make a driver for the camera either, so I'm using the WIN-XP driver, which does work with webcam software, and I can see the images from the camera...I just can't import them, plus the GE webcam doesn't work with Windows Vista either, even though I've downloaded and have installed the latest driver for it, but I can get the Labtec webcam to work with Windows Vista, but I just haven't been able to get pictures off of the digital camera with Windows Photo Gallery.

    Windows Photo Gallery does see the HP PSC 1410v All-In-One printer/scanner/copier though, but I don't need to import pictures from there.

    I have scanned pictures to the hard drive in the past, and I haven't tried that with Vista yet, but I'll probably have trouble with that too.

    Have a Great Day,

    Bernardlj

  6. BronxBoy
    Posted on: August 18, 2008 at 7:08PM  

    I seem to have a problem with the Duplicate Detection feature of Photo Gallery.  I had been downloading photos from numerous memory cards, using a memory card reader, onto my new Dell laptop, running Vista Home Premium.  I downloaded 114 photos from a micro (cell phone) card.  A few minutes later, I mistakenly plugged the same card back into the computer.  Instead of telling me that "Windows has not found any new items," it recognized and downloaded 66 items, which were duplicates of some of the 114 from that card that were already in Photo Gallery.  What can I do to make the Duplcate Detection work properly?

  7. ravindra106
    Posted on: March 13, 2009 at 7:02AM  

    i also have some problems regarding this but anyways thanx for sharing.

    ------------

    http://www.funmahol.com

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  1. Posted by: Windows Vista Team Blog on February 15, 2007 at 5:11PM

    We've posted on Windows Photo Gallery before, but I've been noticing a great deal of questions regarding

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