Hands on: Windows Photo Gallery

If you’re running Windows XP, you may wonder what new digital imaging features Vista offers and whether these, in addition to other obvious benefits of a brand new OS, make an immediate upgrade something you should give serious thought to.

Although it has come in for some stick over the years, XP’s support for digital photos has been pretty good. The ability to display a folder of thumbnails, get large image previews in filmstrip view and play a full-screen slideshow of a photo folder means there’s a lot you can do without an image-editing application.

If you just want to look at your photos, XP offers better support, at the OS level at least, than the Mac. But Microsoft had nothing to compete with Apple’s iLife suite, which includes iPhoto – a basic image-editing application with organisational tools.

Vista changes all that, though. Windows Photo Gallery is a photo editor and organiser that ships with all editions of the OS. Before we look at WPG, there are some digital image-specific features of the operating system itself that are worth a mention.

Folder views
Unlike XP, which treated photo folders in a separate way from folders of other documents, there’s no distinction in Vista. View options include resizable icons that can be made quite large.

The Filmstrip view has been dropped, which is a shame as I used it all the time to preview a batch of shots before editing and considered it one of XP’s strongest assets. Vista has other features, however, that make up for this one shortcoming.

If you select Preview Pane from the Layout sub-menu of the Organize menu you can more or less emulate the old filmstrip view by resizing the Preview pane to fill most of the window (see picture). It’s a side-by side, rather than a top/bottom split, but it works in essentially the same fashion and if you turn off the navigation pane you can allocate even more space to the preview.

At the bottom of the window is the Details pane and this, for me at least, marks the biggest departure from XP, providing the most powerful digital-imaging features yet found in an operating system – the ability to directly edit metadata.

The Details pane includes date taken, keyword tags, rating, pixel dimensions and file size. Camera metadata – make, model and exposure details – are included, as is a subset of the IPTC (International Press and Telecommunications Council) standard metadata fields, including title, subject, author and comments.

All this is editable, so you can offload images from your camera, get a good look at them, rate them and add keywords and metadata without going anywhere near an image editor.

See also:

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