Windows Photo Gallery is a great tool for managing a large photo collection. Windows Photo Gallery is a program that helps you bring together pictures and videos from all the subfolders in your Pictures folder. Photo Gallery isn’t a folder where you store files. Rather, it’s a way of organizing and accessing files without having to navigate around through multiple folders. For example, you can view all your photos at once, regardless of what folders they’re in. Or better yet, you can locate and work with pictures that have certain things in common, such as all the pictures of your child (if you’re a parent). The only disadvantage of Windows Photo Gallery is that it doesn’t show icons for all pictures and videos. Anything that doesn’t show a thumbnail in your Pictures folder doesn’t show up at all in Photo Gallery! Photo Gallery shows thumbnails for BMP, JFIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and WDP photos and WMV, AVI, ASF, and MPEG movies. The easiest way to understand what Windows Photo Gallery is all about is to fire it up and take a look for yourself. Use whichever method shown here is easiest for you: - Click (or double-click) any picture thumbnail in your Pictures folder to preview it, then click Gallery in the lower-right corner of the preview window that opens. - Click the Start button and choose Windows Photo Gallery. - Click Start and choose All Programs  ->  Windows Photo Gallery. - Tap the Windows key, type gal, and click Windows Photo Gallery.

What about RAW Pictures?

Some cameras store pictures as RAW files. The filename extension for this file type varies. For example, Canon uses .CRW and .CR2. Nikon uses .NEF. It’s possible to view some of these files in Photo Gallery, but most require downloading special software. When you open Windows Photo Gallery, it will check to see if any online updates are available to display your pictures. If it finds an appropriate update, you’ll be given the opportunity to download and install it automatically.

Like any program window, you can minimize, maximize, move, and size Photo Gallery to your liking. (Though there is a limit to how small you can make it.) Photo Gallery has its own Help. Click the blue Get Help button at the right side of its toolbar to open Help (or press F1 if Photo Gallery is the active window).

Choosing what to view and how The Photo Gallery can show you all the photos and videos on your hard drive (or multiple hard drives). Or it can show only certain ones. To get started, you’ll want to see everything that’s in the Photo Gallery right now. To do that, click All Pictures and Videos at the top of the Navigation pane. If you just want to see pictures, click Pictures under the All Pictures and Videos heading. If you just want to see Videos, click Videos under that same heading. The gallery to the right of the Navigation pane shows a thumbnail for each photo and video currently in the gallery. Use the Thumbnail View and Thumbnail Size buttons to choose how you want those thumbnails to look. Clicking the Thumbnail View button offers Thumbnails, Thumbnails with Text, and Tiles views. Try each one to see how it looks. Then use the Thumbnail Size button to make the thumbnails whatever size you like. Or, if your mouse has a wheel, hold down the Ctrl key while spinning the wheel. To get back to the original sizes, click the Set Default Thumbnail Size button to the right of the Thumbnail Size button. To group or arrange pictures in the gallery, click the Thumbnail View button, choose Arrange By or Group By and whatever option best describes how you want things organized. Also in the Thumbnail View button is a Table of Contents option. Clicking that opens a Table of Contents pane to the left of the Thumbnails. The Table of Contents works in conjunction with the current Group By option on the Thumbnail View button. For example, if you group by Month, the Table of Contents lets you jump to all pictures taken in a specific month and year. If you group by Image Size, the Table of Contents provides links to large, medium, and small pictures, and so forth. Go ahead and play around with those buttons and options for a while. You can’t do any harm. But some of the grouping and arranging options won’t have any real effect until you’ve built up a sizable collection of pictures. Remember, anything you choose right now you can change at any time in the future. You’re not making any long-term commitments here while experimenting with views and arrangements.

Photo Gallery quick tips Following are some other good things to know. If any item listed doesn’t work for you, see “Choosing Photo Gallery options” later in this article. - Rest the mouse pointer on any thumbnail to see a larger view of the picture. - To rotate a picture, right-click it and choose a Rotate option. Or click the thumbnail and click a Rotate button in the picture controls. - Click any picture to see it in the Info pane where you can rate it, add, change, or remove tags, or change its caption. Click the Info toolbar button to show/hide the Info pane. - Double-click any picture to preview it at a larger size. Click Back to Gallery to leave the preview. - Click Play Slide Show (center of the picture controls) or press F11 to watch a slide show. - To open a picture or video in a program, click its thumbnail and then click the Open toolbar button and choose a program. - Click the File button and choose Import from Camera or Scanner to import pictures from a digital camera or scanner. - To print selected pictures, click the Print toolbar button. (See “Printing Pictures” later in this article for details and options.) - To open the folder in which a picture is contained, right-click its thumbnail and choose Open File Location.

Selecting thumbnails in the gallery As in folders, you can select multiple thumbnails in Photo Gallery. This can be handy when you want to apply a similar rating, tag, or caption to pictures. Or when you want to create a slide show from several pictures, print several pictures, and so forth. You can use the same techniques you use in folders to select thumbnails in the gallery. In addition to the standard methods of selecting thumbnails (and icons), you can select multiple thumbnails just by clicking their checkboxes. Any thumbnail that has a checkmark is selected. Any thumbnail that doesn’t have a checkmark is unselected. To select all the pictures in the gallery, click any single picture and press Ctrl+A. Or right-click some empty space just outside the thumbnails and choose Select All. If you want to select most (but not all) of the pictures, select them all first. Then Ctrl+Click the pictures you want to un-select, or clear their checkboxes.

Use a picture as your desktop background If you have a favorite photo you’d like to use as a desktop background, right-click its thumbnail and choose Set as Desktop Background. If you can’t see the desktop, right-click the clock and choose Show the Desktop. Then click the Windows Photo Gallery taskbar button to bring Photo Gallery back onto the desktop.

Adding pictures to Photo Gallery Photo Gallery doesn’t scan your entire hard disk for photos. By default in includes only pictures from the Pictures folder in your user account. If you have pictures in other folders, there are several ways to add them to Photo Gallery. If the pictures are in some arbitrary location where they just happened to end up, consider moving them to your Pictures folder. Use any technique described in Article 29 to move and copy files. If the pictures are in some other folder for good reason, you can add that folder to Windows Photo Gallery. This has no effect on the pictures or the folder. So you won’t mess up your existing organization. To add a folder to the Photo Gallery:

1. Click the Files toolbar button and choose Add Folder to Gallery.

2. Navigate to any folder that contains pictures and videos you’d like to include in your gallery and click OK. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for each folder you want to add. As you add new pictures to those folders in the future, they’ll show up automatically in Photo Gallery. If you want to add a single picture to the gallery, rather than a whole folder, you can do so from the Photo Gallery Viewer described next.

Zooming and panning The Zoom tool (magnifying glass) lets you zoom in for a close-up look at any portion of the picture. As an alternative, you can click the picture and spin your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Once you’re zoomed in, the mouse pointer changes to a small hand (when it’s on the picture). When the pointer looks like a hand, hold down the left mouse button and drag to pan through the zoomed-in picture. Click the Fit to Window button to size the photo back to where it fits within the viewer.

Right-click the photo you’re viewing in the Photo Gallery for a shortcut menu of things you can do with that picture. Back to the Gallery The Photo Gallery Viewer offers most of the same tools as Photo Gallery. The main difference is that the Viewer only shows one picture at a time. To return to thumbnails of all your pictures, click Go To Gallery in the upper-left corner.

Making a duplicate photo Sometimes you may want several copies of the same photo. For example, the original as it came from your camera. A smaller copy to e-mail to friends. Perhaps a cropped version to put in a small frame. You don’t want to mess up your original photo in the process. So it’s always a good idea to work with a copy of the original photo. Making a copy is easy in Photo Gallery:

1. Click the Thumbnail of the picture you want to duplicate.

2. Click the File toolbar button and choose Duplicate. The duplicate will have the same filename as the original followed by –copy. It will be the last thumbnail in the gallery. If you click the Name column heading once or twice to bring them into alphabetical order, the copy will be close to the original.

Use your Photo Gallery as a screen saver To use photos in your Photo Gallery as a screen saver, click the File toolbar button and choose Screen Saver Settings. Set the Screen Saver name to Photos. Then click the Settings button and choose Show all pictures and photos from Photo Gallery. If you like, you can narrow things down to only pictures that have a certain tag or rating. You can also set the general speed of the screen saver slide show. Click Save after making your selections. Click Preview for a preview of how the screen saver will look. Click OK when you’re happy with your selections to return to Photo Gallery.

Fixing photos The Fix pane makes it easy to touch up your photos. It’s a far cry from a “real” graphics editor like PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro. But it can fix the most common photo problems. Windows Photo Gallery comes complete with a simple graphics editor specifically designed to work with photos. It’s called the Fix pane and you can get to it in a couple of ways: - If you’re in Windows Photo Gallery, click the thumbnail of the photo you want to edit and click Fix in the toolbar. - If you’re already viewing a single photo in the Photo Gallery viewer, just click Fix in the toolbar. The Fix pane replaces the Info pane on the right. Before you try anything, notice the Undo button at the bottom. If you don’t like the results of a change, click that to undo the change. If you change your mind after Undo, click Redo to bring the change back. When you point to Undo and Redo after making changes to a picture, you’ll see a little arrow on the button that you can click to Undo only one change, or all changes. The buttons are disabled (dimmed) when there’s nothing to undo or redo. The sections to follow describe each tool on the Fix pane.