Photo Gallery - Importing

Importing pictures and video from a digital camera is not hard at all. All it requires is taking the SD card out of your digital camera and putting it in the card reader portion of your computer. If you don't have a card reader, just plug in your camera into the USB port of your computer.

Windows Vista will see it as a external data device and ask you what you want to do. Just left click on import into Photo Gallery. Windows will take care of the rest.

After the pictures or video is imported you can edited and/or organize them as you see fit.

Photo Gallery - Tools

Microsoft put into Photo Gallery some basic tools that will help you make those pictures look better, before you send them on to your family or friends.



At the top of Photo Gallery's main window left click on Fix. This will open the photo you selected into a new window. On the right hand side is a menu with five options. These option are to help you do some basic clean up and adjustment of you photos.

1. Auto Adjust. This feature will examine the photo and automatically adjust its brightness, contrast, color, and tint with a click of the button.
2. Adjust Exposure. This option expands thus giving you two choices; brightness and contrast. Each can be manually edited by the use of its' own slide bar.
3. Adjust Color. Here this tool expands to three options, color, tint, and saturation. The color choice lets you change to cooler or warmer colors. The tint lets you put in more accurate color to the individual picture. Finally, saturation which determines if the images colors are virtually gone (grayscale) or a deeply rich color.
4. Crop Picture. In my opinion this is a must. I seem to always have a picture that needs to be trimmed and rotated. This is the tool that will do it.
5. Fix Red Eye. Red eye removal works quite well. Most digital camera, today, have this feature built into them. I would first have the camera set for red eye removal. Then use this feature it your subjects still have red eye.
   

Note: At the bottom of the menu on the right side is an undo edit button. This is just in case your edit did not look so good. You can start over from the beginning.

Photo Gallery - Thumbnails

Thumbnails are smaller pictures of a larger picture. They are meant to give you an idea of that picture without having to open that picture. This makes it real nice when you looking through a folder for one specific picture.

Windows Vista's Picture Gallery than this feature one step further. Picture Gallery allows you to hover you cursor over the thumbnail to get a larger view of the picture.

Then there is more! You not only get to see the picture, but you get to some detail of that picture.
At the bottom of the picture you get details like;

• The file name of the picture
• The rating you gave the picture
• The title
• The date and time stamp of that picture
• The file size
  
• The size of the picture in pixels

What more can you ask from an enlarge thumbnail of a picture?

Photo Gallery - Menu Bar

Before I move on to the next topic I want to stay a couple of days on the Photo Gallery. Just because it has some features that I think is really cool.

Today, we will look at the menu bar. The nice thing about Windows Vista is that you can see a programs biggest features just by taking a close look at the menu bar. Photo Gallery is no exception.

Instead of the traditional File, Edit, and View, Vista lets you see the features up front. In the case of Photo Gallery, you can Email, Print and Burn.

Bottomline these are the features at your fingertips.

Picture Gallery - Organize

All of the versions of Vista come with what it titled Picture Gallery. It is a great replacement for the old My Pictures of Windows XP. Until now I would you Google's Picasa to keep my pictures organize.

In Windows XP there was a My Pictures folder. Now in Windows Vista it is named just Pictures. Each user has their own folder. It is located on the main hard drive; C:\Users\username\Pictures.

If you are like me you have hundreds if not thousands of photo. The trick is to keep then and have them organized so a specific photo can be found. Well, in Windows Vista the left menu bar help you do that.

The Vista Picture Gallery allows you to organize your pictures by date, category or rating. Can it get any easier than that. Well it can! In the right preview window, you can left click on a picture, hold the left mouse button down. and drag it to another category or folder.