Practice picture perfection

Use Windows Photo Gallery to organize photos and get images looking their best

By Marc Saltzman

Like many Canadian moms, Erica Ehm, television and radio personality and creator of the online Yummy Mummy Club, loves taking photos of her two young children.

“I think I might only have two photos of my husband,” laughs Ehm, “but I take a ton of pictures of my kids, so I can remember what they look like at every stage as they grow older.”

But once memories are captured and copied to the computer, concedes Ehm, “they just sit there.”

Ehm is not alone. Millions of Canadians amass countless photos on their computers and never seem to do anything with them. Fortunately for Windows Vista owners, this dilemma can become a thing of the past.

Microsoft’s newest operating system includes Windows Photo Gallery, which lets users easily view, manage, edit and share photos and home movies — all in one place.

“I’m constantly looking for an easy solution to deal with my disorganization,” says Ehm. “Windows Photo Gallery sounds like that solution — but it needs to be easy. If there’s a big learning curve, I’ll lose interest.”

Consider the following a walkthrough of the features packed into Windows Photo Gallery.

You got the look

Photo Gallery’s main gallery screen displays photos in convenient thumbnail view so you can see dozens of images at a time. Glide your mouse over the images and see them magnified. Read the name of the photo, the date it was taken, the size of the photo and the star rating, if you’ve given it one. Want to see the photo full screen? Just double-click.

Along the top of the gallery screen is a toolbar that lets you perform a number of functions. File, for example, is where you click to copy photos or videos, or import more images from a camera, camcorder, scanner, hard drive or other source. On this toolbar you can also Print, Burn or E-mail photos, the latter first asking you if you’d like to resize before proceeding. The Open tab gives you the option to launch any of your other photo- or video-related applications directly from within Windows Photo Gallery.

Controls along the bottom of the screen let you launch a slide show within seconds. Simply highlight which thumbnail images you like, and click the circle button in the middle to enjoy a full-screen slide show. Other options at the bottom include resizing and rotating photos.

Along the left-hand side of the Windows Photo Gallery is a Navigation Tree, which includes a chronological look at your photos, organized into years and months. This feature allows you to find your photos in a variety of ways, including searching chronologically through photographs organized into years and months.

Tag, you’re it!

One of the most exciting features in Windows Photo Gallery is the ability to find photos simply by typing in a few associated keywords, which are called tags. Type in your keywords, such as Maya, Cape Cod, beach or vacation, and the related photo will pop up.

This is a terrific idea for those (such as yours truly) with literally thousands of digital photos stored on their hard drive. After all, your camera only gives photos an arbitrary file name, such as P3180014.jpg, which doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

Adding tags to many photos may seem a daunting task, but you only need to do it once. You can even select a number of photos and add tags to all of them simultaneously.

Fix photos and make movies

Windows Photo Gallery gives you many options to edit photos, whether you need to brighten up underexposed photos, fix red-eye (a common occurrence with light-eyed kids and pets), adjust colour and image size, or crop out unwanted subjects. Not technically savvy? No worries — just click Auto Adjust to let the program detect what your photo needs to look its best.

Click the Make a Movie tab to launch Windows Movie Maker, an incredibly easy yet powerful tool to create homemade movies using videos (including camcorder footage), photos and music. Similar to the version in Windows XP, but now with new features, you can create beautiful transition sequences, add special effects, write titles and captions, and burn your masterpiece onto a disc to view on a DVD player.