Windows Photo Gallery offers an easier, more intuitive way to view, manage and refine your photos and home movies. A streamlined process simplifies acquiring and importing images and videos, and new organisational options make it easier to find and enjoy your memories. And you have the flexibility to launch any of your other photo- and video-related applications from directly within Windows Photo Gallery.
A toolbar across the top of Windows Photo Gallery offers shortcuts to tasks and information, while the familiar left-hand navigation bar provides easy access to organisational elements. You can use the control bar at the bottom of the screen to launch a slide show with a single click, and use the slider to quickly resize your thumbnails for comfortable viewing.
Organise, find and enjoy your photos.
Windows Photo Gallery offers basic photo editing, such as the ability to easily remove red eye. If you decide you don't want to keep the changes, you can revert to the original version of the photo with one click.
You can easily print your photos via a local printer using the Photo Print Wizard, or use the Online Print Wizard to send them to a retail photo finisher for printing. With the integration between Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker in Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Home Premium, and Windows Vista Ultimate, you can use your digital photos and videos to express yourself in a home movie using cool effects and transitions.
If you have Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate, you can then create a professional-looking video DVD to preserve and share your movies using Windows DVD Maker.
In Windows Vista, one click is all it takes to copy your pictures onto your PC. More advanced users can customise the process to simplify common acquisition tasks, such as changing the import destination or renaming and replicating photo and video files.
Windows Vista indexes the pictures and videos on your PC for fast, efficient retrieval. You can even customise this function and choose which folders to index.
To find a picture quickly, enter a word or two in the search field. Instant Search searches across tags, folder names, file names and captions and gives you fast results.
You can apply tags in a variety of ways to help you organise and find your photos and videos. You can add tags when you first add a photo or video to your collection, or you can select a photo, or multiple photos, to tag at any time.
Alternatively, you can tag images using the new Info Pane. You can open the Info Pane to view basic information about a photo or a video, including the file name, date taken, rating and other information. You can change most of this information just by clicking and typing.
The Windows Photo Gallery Viewer provides a large view of individual photos or clips with options to zoom, pan and rotate photos, pause or play video files, and bring up the Info Pane. You can quickly navigate from one photo or video clip to the next.
Easily view and enhance photos.
The Viewer also has built-in editing capabilities – such as fixing red eye and adjusting exposure, colour and size – to help you make your photos look great.
Remember when a slide show was just a series of photos? Not anymore. Windows Vista Slide Show sets a new standard for creating and presenting your digital memories full-screen. You can include video as well as still photos – another benefit of the slide show functionality in Windows Photo Gallery.
Choose from a variety of themes to help you quickly incorporate cool visual effects and transitions; Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate have more slide show themes than the Home Basic edition.
Create compelling slide shows.
A new desktop Slide Show Screen Saver feature helps you to choose photos, videos and even themes to be displayed in Screen Saver. The Slide Show Screen Saver introduces powerful queries that you can use to base slide shows on tags and ratings you applied in Windows Photo Gallery.
The Windows Vista Photo-Video E-Mail Wizard enables you to easily select, compress and send photos and videos via email in just a few short steps.
Windows Vista gives you two ways to print photos: the Online Print Wizard and the Photo Print Wizard. With either method, you can select photos and then a print task from either Windows Photo Gallery or the Pictures Explorer.
You can view video clips and photos in the new Windows Photo Gallery Viewer or in slide show mode. Both the Viewer and the slide show take full advantage of your computer's graphics processing power, using it to boost performance and enable high-definition video playback.
Edit and view video clips.
Windows Photo Gallery works with other programs, too, including Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker. You can drag photos and video clips from Windows Photo Gallery into either of these programs, making it easy to create rich movies and video DVDs from the content in your library.
