With the growth of the Internet and social networking over the past 3 years, Windows Photo Gallery was not cut out to keep up with the times. The organization features in particular made Photo Gallery a great asset for the digital camera, in addition to tagging, features like rating, events, sorting and the ability to quickly search through collections was a great benefit.
Photo Gallery focused on managing photos efficiently through features unique to Vista such as tagging, simplified way to import your pictures, editing, sharing through e-mail, printing and integration with programs and tools such as Movie Maker and DVD Maker. Windows Photo Gallery UI changes, Vista release (top) and Live Photo Gallery 2008 To compensate for consumers growing digital image collections, the Windows Team made the decision to integrate photo management capabilities out of the box through a new feature called Windows Photo Gallery. Windows Vista focused on solving this through key features such as Instant Search, Improved Graphics and Networking. They also saw the changing landscape of digital media and the limitations associated with managing it. Microsoft introduced a lot of technological improvements in Windows 7’s predecessor. Windows Vista, introducing Windows Photo Gallery Digital Library included features such as Thumbnail preview, archiving, rating, keyword or tags as we call them today. In fact, Digital Image Suite included an early predecessor to Windows Live Photo Gallery called Digital Image Suite Library. Microsoft focused on supplementing Windows XP’s photography capabilities with its Digital Image Suite software.
Of course, the Internet eventually played a critical role in this endeavor. However, this did not solve some of the key management issues like events, searching, and better ways of viewing and sharing your photos with family and friends.
Working with Photos on Windows over the years Some would consider this a major step up to digital photography in 2001. Also, photos in a directory displayed thumbnail previews to quickly find photos of interest. Options included viewing a slide show, ordering prints online, printing pictures and ability to create photo CDs. Still not enough, Microsoft added further improvements through services in Windows XP for working with Pictures, called the Picture Tasks located under the Windows XP Task Pane. With the release of Windows 2000, Microsoft improved the My Pictures directory with thumbnail support which was a nice improvement to easily discover photos. But, it was just a simple folder anybody could create and add their pictures to, no big deal. With the release of Windows 98, Microsoft introduced its first effort at managing pictures in Windows called the ‘My Pictures’ directory.
So how do you get it under control? For years, there have been many third party software solutions on the market for managing photos, some quite expensive with complex features while others too simple to manage the enormous libraries we possess. Its not impossible to come across some picture libraries that range in the hundreds of thousands. That’s not a problem of course, but managing those pictures and even videos can eventually become a chore as we accumulate them over time. Digital Cameras remain one of the hottest electronics that many of us own and the simple point and shoot philosophy allows us to quickly capture memories without thinking twice.
Picasa makes modifications as a script, leaving the original image file unscathed, and when exporting a copy, leaves the "master" in the same folder tree where it always was, making drag and drop backups and restoring easy and reliable.Īlong with Picasa - great for printing - I also use free IrfanView for many tasks, like resizing, cropping, cutting and pasting into combination pictures, lossless JPG rotation and cropping, and batch tasks, including renaming, and filtering to black-and-white copies.Photography is one of the many fun activities we take part in every chance we get. Unlike free Google Picasa, free Windows Live Photo Gallery makes copies of any image touched and moves and renames the original out of the user's access.
Then I have an all-purpose, well-identified library for all time that any program, especially Windows Explorer, can access and browse, and backups are easy, smartly adding only new files to external USB drive archive similarly organized for all time - hey, it's all library science, right? " and so on to "myname-date-1234.Raw myname-date-1235.Raw.
Then I use free (one for all) Rename for basic group renaming, taking a series of picture files like "PICT1234.Raw PICT1235.Raw. Then I use Picasa to expand the directory name to C:\DCIM\MyName Date Count Camera Location Description\*.* I use Picasa to import images from my camera card into c:\DCIM\Date\*.*