As with Windows Explorer windows, you can group information shown in Windows Photo Gallery’s Thumbnails view by a variety of criteria, including Auto Date Taken, Month Taken, Year Taken, Occasion, File Size, Image Size, File Type, Rating, Folder, Tag, Camera, or None, in either ascending or descending order. This feature works identically to its shell-based cousin: When grouping is enabled, pictures are segregated into visual groups. So if you group by Year Taken, for example, you will see groups such as 2006, 2005, and so on. The Arrange By option determines the order in which pictures will be arranged within groups or, if you have Group By set to None, then within the entire view. You can choose between Date Taken, Date Modified, File Size, Image Size, Rating, Caption, and File Name, and can of course sort in ascending or descending order. If you’d like, you can also enable a unique feature called the Table of Contents, which is an optional pane that provides a list of all the groups that are displayed in the Thumbnail pane. Table of Contents is interesting if you are using the Group By feature and have an awful lot of pictures. That’s because Table of Contents acts like the Table of Contents in a article, enabling you to jump from group to group quickly. Say you have grouped by Year Taken. The Table of Contents pane lists the name of each year for which you have one or more photos. Additionally, small blue meters below each year name visually hint at the number of pictures for each year. As you click year names in the Table of Contents, the Thumbnail pane scrolls down to display the corresponding group, 11-12. Also, as it scrolls, a blue box appears in the Table of Contents, visually showing you which portion of your pictures you’re currently viewing.

Adding Tags, Ratings, and Captions to Your Pictures Although the Table of Contents feature is nice, if hidden, you’re probably going to want a more elegant way of filtering the view of your photo collection. For example, what if you’d like to see just your vacation pictures? Or pictures that contain family members? Or any other criteria that might be important to you? Windows Photo Gallery offers a number of ways to help you filter your photo display so that you can see just the photos you want. The problem is, you have to do a bit of work to make these features useful. If you’re really into digital photography, however, we think you’ll agree it will be worth the effort. The first feature is called tags. Tags are unique labels that you can apply to pictures to help you identify which ones are related. By default, every picture in Windows Photo Gallery is not tagged. But you can create your own tags and then apply them to multiple pictures. You can also apply multiple tags to each picture. Tags can be as detailed or generic as you want. But you might consider tags such as Family, Vacation, Personal, Work, Home, and so on.

To create a tag, expand the Tags node in the View By pane. Then, click the Create a New Tag node. When you do so, an edit box appears, letting you create your own tag. Give it a name and then press Enter. (You can also create a tag by right-clicking an empty area of the Thumbnails pane and choosing Add Tags.) You might want to do this repeatedly until you’ve created all the relevant tags you can think of. To add tags to your pictures, select the picture or pictures you’d like to tag and then drag them over to the tag name in the View By pane. You can drag pictures to multiple tags if you’d like, so, for example, some pictures might end up being tagged as Family, Vacation, and Personal. You can also add tags via the Info Pane. To do so, select a picture or set of pictures and click the Add Tag link in the Info Pane. The new tag will be added to both the pictures and the list of available tags. To remove a tag, select the picture or pictures you’d like to affect.

Finally, you can optionally create a unique caption for each of your pictures if you’d like. These labels are simply descriptive text strings, so you can be creative if you’d like. You might add text such as “Doesn’t Kelly look surprised here?” or “Bob finally crested the top of the mountain!” It’s up to you. To add a label to a picture or group of pictures, select one or more pictures and then click in the Add a Caption box at the bottom of the Info Pane. Add any text you like. Tags, captions, and ratings are what’s known as metadata, which is simply data about data. Put another way, metadata is information that summarizes or explains the context of the underlying object, which is in this case a picture. Other files, including documents, music files, and video files, all include the ability to contain metadata. Tags, ratings, and captions travel with the underlying pictures. That is, they’re not limited to Windows Photo Gallery. If you rate a picture with five stars, for example, that rating will show up in Windows Media Player 11 or other applications that are compatible with this kind of metadata. Likewise, if you change the rating, tag, or caption for a picture inside of Windows Media Player, that change will reflect in Windows Photo Gallery.

Searching for Pictures in Photo Gallery Adding metadata like tags, ratings, and captions is nice for filtering the current view, but you can also use these and other metadata to search for specific pictures from within Windows Photo Gallery in the same way that you search for documents and other files from Windows Explorer. Not coincidentally, this metadata also factors into shell-based searches as well from within Windows Vista. When you add metadata to a digital media file, it can be used from virtually anywhere, assuming the application or service is aware of such information. To search for pictures in Windows Photo Gallery, simply type a search phrase into the search box located to the right of the Choose a thumbnail view button. If you tagged certain pictures with a tag such as vacation, for example, you could use that phrase to find all your vacation pictures. But you can also search for text in filenames and captions.

Importing Pictures into Photo Gallery

If you already have pictures on your PC, you can add pictures to Windows Photo Gallery by copying them into watch folders, adding their containing folders to the application’s watch folder list, or by dragging them directly into the application window. But what if you need to import new pictures via a digital camera, memory card, picture CD or DVD, or scanner? Like Windows XP, Windows Vista supports image acquisition via these sources. When you plug in a compatible camera or memory card, the Windows Auto Play function kicks in and asks you what you’d like to do. The default choice, Import Using Windows, runs a simple wizard that steps you through the process of acquiring your pictures. If you don’t see the Auto Play dialog box appear for some reason, you can open My Computer, right-click the appropriate device, and choose Open Auto Play. In the first step of the wizard, you can add a new tag or select an existing tag from a dropdown list. (If you’d like to add more than one tag, you’ll need to do so later in Windows Photo Gallery.) Then, you click Import, and optionally choose to delete the original files from the camera or memory card. When the import process is complete, Windows Photo Gallery loads with the Most Recently Added node displayed so you can see, organize, and edit your new pictures as needed. Behind the scenes, a lot of other things have happened. First, the image import wizard created a folder inside of Pictures that is constructed from the date plus the tag name you supplied earlier. So, if the date is May 29, 2006 and you used the tag Bob’s Office, you’ll see a folder called 2006-04-29 Bob’s Office inside of Pictures. Each photo inside of that folder is named accordingly: You’ll see Bob’s Office 001, Bob’s Office 002, and so on. Meanwhile, the Bob’s Office tag has also been added to the list of tags found inside of Windows Photo Gallery. You can now apply this tag to other pictures, if you’d like, or add other tags to the pictures you just imported. You can change a variety of options related to importing pictures via the Windows Photo Gallery Options dialog box. To access this dialog box, click the File toolbar button and then choose Options. On the Import tab, shown in article 11-16, you’ll see a number of options you can change, including the folder to which imported pictures should be copied, the name that the wizard generates for the new pictures and containing folder, and so on. You can also click a link to revert to the system default settings.

The photo import functionality in Windows Vista is actually not as full-featured as that in Windows XP, which is unexpected. In Windows XP, you may recall, you could actually choose which pictures to import from the camera or memory card. In Vista, you simply import every single picture. There’s no way to pick and choose.

You can access the options for the photo import functionality by accessing the File menu in Windows Photo Gallery and choosing Options. Then, navigate to the Import tab.

Editing Pictures When you double-click an image in Windows Photo Gallery, the application switches into its Viewer mode, which is identical to the Photo Gallery Viewer application you see when you open image files from the Windows shell. In Viewer mode, Photo Gallery replaces the View By and Thumbnail view panes (and the Table of Contents, if it’s displayed) with a simpler display consisting only of the image you’re viewing and the Info Pane. In this view, you’ll often want to click the Fix button to display the application’s image editing functions.

Editing Photos with Windows Photo Gallery This is a big change from Windows XP, which didn’t typically offer much in the way of editing functionality beyond the very basic facilities of Windows Paint. When you preview an image and then click the Fix button in Windows Photo Gallery, the display changes by replacing the Info Pane with a list of image editing features, 11-17.

The Windows Photo Gallery image editing features are as follows:

Auto Adjust: Evaluates the picture and performs a variety of changes based on the needs of the image. Basically, it’s a best-guess estimate of what needs to be fixed, and although it’s often a decent try, you’ll want to carefully evaluate the changes before committing them to the file. If you do commit to any of the changes in Fix mode, the underlying graphic file will be overwritten. Because of the compressed nature of JPEG images in particular, resaving digital photos can result in dramatic quality reduction. Be careful not to resave JPEG images too often; if you’re going to edit a JPEG file, edit and save it once. If you don’t like what Auto Adjust does to your picture, click the Undo button at the bottom of the Info Pane. If you’ve performed multiple operations, this button will popup a menu that lets you choose which operations to undo, or you can Undo All changes you’ve made.

Adjust Exposure: Unlike Auto Adjust, this doesn’t provide a single-click solution. Instead, when you click this option, the Info Pane expands to display slider controls for Brightness and Contrast. You move these sliders to the left and right to adjust these properties until you’re happy with the results.

Adjust Color: This is also a little more involved. When you select this option, another new area expands in the Info Pane, letting you use sliders to adjust the temperature, tint, and saturation of the photo.

Crop Picture: Enables you to crop the current picture, allowing you to change its aspect ratio if needed, or simply to edit out parts of the picture that are uninteresting. A proportion drop-down box, shown in article 11-18, enables you to determine how you’d like the picture cropped.

After you have picked a proportion, you can use the onscreen guide lines to select the portion of the image you’d like cropped.

Because cropping a picture can often result in a dramatically different final image, you may want to copy, or duplicate, a picture before cropping it, just in case. To do so, select the image you want to crop and then choose Duplicate from the File button’s drop-down menu.

Fix Red Eye: Red-eye correction is one of the most often-needed features in any photo-editing package, and fortunately the one in Windows Photo Gallery works pretty well. Simply click this option and then draw a rectangle around each of the eyes you want to correct in the current picture. They’re not documented, but there are some handy keyboard shortcuts you can use while editing pictures with Windows Photo Gallery. For example, you can zoom in on a picture by pressing Ctrl and the + key at the same time, and zoom out with Ctrl and -. Normally, when you’re zoomed in, you can move around the picture using the small hand cursor. But in certain edit tasks, like Crop Picture and Fix Red Eye, the cursor changes for other purposes, preventing you from navigating around a zoomed picture. To return temporarily to the hand icon in these edits, hold down the Alt key and move around with the mouse. Then, release the Alt key and the cursor will return to the way it was before. By the way, Ctrl+0 zooms the picture back to its default zoom level (where the picture fills the entire viewing area).

Editing with Other Applications Although the very basic editing features in Windows Photo Gallery should satisfy many people’s needs, there are many other photo editing solutions out there, and you may want to use them to edit photos as well. If you own a third-party solution like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Google Picasa, you can use those applications to edit digital photos, and you can access them directly from within Windows Photo Gallery, which is pretty handy. The key to doing so is the Open button on the Windows Photo Gallery toolbar. If you don’t have any photo-editing applications installed in Windows Vista, you will simply see Windows Paint listed in the resulting drop-down menu when you click this button. But if you installed a third-party application, it should appear in the list as well, 11-19. This way, you can edit a photo in the application you like the most, while still using Photo Gallery’s excellent management capabilities to perform other photorelated tasks. But what happens when your application doesn’t appear in the Open drop-down menu? You can add it easily enough: Simply select Choose Program from the Open drop-down menu and then choose the program from the list, or click the Browse button to find it on your hard drive. When you’ve accessed a program in this fashion, it will be added to the Open drop-down list.

Sharing Photos with Others Although you may find the process of managing, organizing, and editing photos to be somewhat tedious, there is of course a wonderful payoff: Once you’ve created an extensive photo library containing your most precious memories, you can then share those photos with your family, friends, and others in a stunning variety of ways. One way to think of this situation is that Windows Photo Gallery is only the means to an end: For the most part, you’ll use this application for the nitty-gritty management work, and then use its sharing features to spread the wealth.

Enjoying Photos on Your Own PC Before we get into the various ways in which you can share your digital memories with others, let’s examine a few ways in which you can enjoy your photos on your own PC. First, you can use any picture as a desktop background. There are a multitude of ways to do this, but one of the best things you can do is duplicate a favorite picture in Windows Photo Gallery, and then use the application’s Crop feature to crop it to the exact resolution (or aspect ratio) of your screen. That way, you won’t have to worry about stretching the picture in any way on your desktop. Windows Vista also enables you to use animated photo slideshows as a screensaver. To access this functionality, open the Control Panel and navigate to Appearance and Personalization. The, choose Change screen saver from the Personalization section. In the

resulting dialog box, choose Photos from the Screensaver drop-down menu. Then, click Settings. 11-20, this dialog box enables you to choose which pictures to use in your screensaver along with various other related options. You can click Preview to see how your new screensaver looks.

The Windows Vista Photos screensaver doesn’t just work with photos; it uses videos as well. So you can also mix home movies into your slideshow.

Printing Pictures and Order Prints If you want to share pictures with others, one of the most obvious ways is to create traditional paper-based prints. These can be wonderful gifts, and while it’s pretty clear we’re in the middle of a digital revolution, not everyone has a PC or wants to enjoy pictures only with their computer. There are two ways to create picture prints in Windows Vista. You can print pictures on your own photo printer, if you have one, or you can order prints online.

To print pictures yourself, open Windows Photo Gallery, select the picture (or pictures) you’d like to print, click the Print button in the toolbar, and then choose Print from the drop-down menu.

From this deceptively simple wizard, you can customize the print job in a variety of ways, choosing what size prints to create, which printer to use, and a number of other options. To order prints from an online photo service, select a group of photos and then choose Order Prints from the Print button’s drop-down menu. This launches the Order Prints wizard, which provides a handy front end to various online printing services that have arrangements with Microsoft. You don’t have to settle for the choices Microsoft provides. Bypassing the Order Prints function in Windows Photo Gallery, you can use Internet Explorer or another Web browser to discover, sign up for, and order prints from any number of web-based photo printing services. You can also bring a digital camera memory card into many pharmacies and photo printing retail kiosks and print photos from there.

Getting Creative: Adding Photos to Movies, DVDs, and Data Discs Windows Photo Gallery also offers basic integration features with Windows Move Maker, Windows DVD Maker, and the Windows Vista CD and DVD burning capabilities to help you create movies of your photo slideshows or data discs full of your favorite pictures. To create a digital movie of your favorite photos, select the photos you want in Windows Photo Gallery and then click the Create button on the toolbar and select Movie.

To add a similar slideshow to a DVD movie, select the photos as before and then click the Create button on the toolbar and select DVD. This will import the pictures into Windows DVD Maker, which enables you to create DVD movies. We discuss Windows DVD Maker in Article 12 as well. If you want to create backups of your photo gallery or share pictures with others electronically, Windows Photo Gallery also enables you to create data disks, in either CD or DVD format, as well. Again, you’ll click the Create button on the Windows Photo Gallery toolbar, but this time, you’ll choose Data Disc from the resulting drop-down menu. You’ll be prompted to insert a blank CD or DVD disk into your recordable optical drive, and then Windows Vista will use its integrated disk-burning capabilities to copy the photos onto the disk.

Sharing Through E-mail If you’d like to send a picture or group of pictures to friends or others, you can use the builtin e-mail sharing capabilities of Windows Photo Gallery. First, select the pictures you’d like to send, and then click the E-mail button in the toolbar. The Attach Pictures and Files dialog box will appear 11-23. Here, you can choose how or whether to resize your images for transit, which is likely a good idea, as many of today’s digital photos are quite large. After your selection, a new e-mail message will appear in Windows Mail ( 18) or whatever e-mail application you’ve specified as the default.

Network-Based Library Sharing and Portable Device Syncing Using new functionality in Windows Vista, you can also share your photo library with other Windows Vista–based PCs on your home network, and synchronize with a compatible portable device. Links to both of these options are available via the File buttons’ dropdown menu. However, these features are actually exposed through Windows Media Player 11, not Windows Photo Gallery. For this reason, we discuss this functionality in Article 10.

Using Photo Gallery to Manage Digital Videos Although the name Windows Photo Gallery suggests that this application is suitable only for pictures, it can also be used to manage digital videos as well. Videos can be viewed in Windows Photo Gallery by selecting All Pictures and Videos or Videos from the View By pane, or one of the other video-related nodes. This is shown in article 11-24.

By default, videos appear as thumbnails that provide a glimpse into the contained movie. If you double-click a video in Windows Photo Gallery, the application switches into a preview mode so you can watch the movie, 11-25. (Conversely, when you open a movie file from the Windows shell, it typically opens in Windows Media Player 11.) Even though the Windows Photo Gallery toolbar doesn’t change when you view videos or video previews, some options simply aren’t available with videos. For example, the Fix menu returns a simple message, “Video files can’t be edited using Photo Gallery,” if you try to access it. As with photos, Windows Photo Gallery only parses certain folders when it wants to find video content. These folders are your Videos folder (typically found in C:\Users\ your user name\Videos by default) and the Public Videos folder. However, you can manually add videos from other locations by simply dragging them into the Windows Photo Gallery Thumbnail View pane. Videos are also compatible with the tag, rating, and caption metadata types that are utilized by pictures. This means that you can easily add this information to your videos, filter the view, and search for specific video content just as you do with pictures.

Summary Although Windows Vista completely steps back from the shell-based photo management functionality that was provided in Windows XP, the new Windows Photo Gallery application more than makes up for it. Now, Windows users have a single obvious place to manage, edit, share, and otherwise enjoy digital photos (and videos). Windows Photo Gallery is one of the better end user additions to Windows Vista.