On this most auspicious of days -- assuming you're into that sort of thing -- I figured I'd continue the 10 Things You Didn't Know series by highlighting what I think is one of the most universally applicable and beneficial developments in Windows Vista: the addition of Photo Gallery. Millions of digital cameras (~100M, to be precise) are sold annually and if you have a cell phone, you likely have a camera in it as well. All the images we take each year require a place to store them and then find them when needed.
Enter Windows Vista Photo Gallery. Not only does Photo Gallery make it a lot simpler to manage your photos, but the great thing is that all users can take advantage of Photo Gallery, as it's included in all versions of Windows Vista. In addition to automatically displaying pictures and videos stored in the Pictures folder on your computer, you can also easily add and remove folders to the contents of Photo Gallery by simply dragging them to (or deleting them from) Photo Gallery's navigation pane on its left-hand side. If you only want to add a couple of photos rather than the entire folder, you can do that, too, by dragging only those. This is a big plus if you have digital media stored in multiple locations on your computer.
Once you have the photos added, there are multiple ways to find them by searching the integrated search function for:
If you decide to remove a photo from the Photo Gallery, one thing to be sure you understand is the following, taken from Windowshelp: Photo Gallery is another way to view and organize your pictures and videos. It displays pictures and videos that you've stored in Pictures and in other folders on your computer -- it is not a replacement for folders on your computer. As a result, you should not delete the pictures in Photo Gallery or the Pictures folder unless you actually intend to delete those pictures from your computer. If you do, they will deleted from your computer and no longer appear in either the Pictures folder or in Photo Gallery (of course).