Windows Photo Gallery
This feature is included in the following editions of Windows Vista:
Windows Photo Gallery is where you can view, manage, and refine your photos and home movies.
A toolbar across the top of Windows Photo Gallery offers shortcuts to tasks and information, while the left-hand navigation bar provides access to organizational 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.
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.
Organize, find, and enjoy your photos.
You can print your photos via a local printer using the Photo Print Wizard, or use Online Printing 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.
Acquiring and importing photos and videos
In Windows Vista, you can copy your pictures onto your PC with one click. More advanced users can customize the process to simplify common acquisition tasks, such as changing the import destination or renaming and replicating photo and video files.
Finding, organizing, viewing, and editing photos and videos
Windows Vista indexes the pictures and videos on your PC so you can retrieve them. You can customize this function and choose which folders to index.
To find a picture, enter a word or two in the search field. Instant Search searches across tags, folder names, file names, and captions to give you your results.
Organizing your photos and videos using tags
You can apply tags in a variety of ways to help you organize 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 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.
Viewing and fixing photos and videos
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.
View and enhance photos.
The Viewer also has built-in editing capabilities—such as fixing red eye and adjusting exposure, color, and size.
Creating and viewing slide shows
Windows Vista Slide Show allows you to compile your videos and still photos, and present your digital memories full-screen.
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 slide shows from your photos and videos.
Slide Show Screen Saver
The desktop Slide Show Screen Saver feature helps you to choose photos, videos, and themes to be displayed in Screen Saver. The Slide Show Screen Saver includes queries that you can use to base slide shows on tags and ratings you applied in Windows Photo Gallery.
Sharing photos and videos via e-mail
The Windows Vista Photo-Video E-Mail Wizard enables you to select, compress, and send photos and videos via e-mail.
Printing photos
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.
Watch home videos in Windows Photo Gallery
You can view video clips and photos in the Windows Photo Gallery Viewer or in slide show mode. Both the Viewer and the slide show utilize your computer's graphics processing power 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 to create rich movies and video DVDs from the content in your library.