The new stability of XP is nice, and the new task pane can save you time. But if you have a digital camera, few of the new features in Windows XP are quite as useful as its ability to manage your digital photos. Microsoft has bent over backward to simplify and streamline a process that was once a chain of pain: transferring photos from your camera to the PC, and then trying to figure out what to do with them. 8.1.1 Hooking Up Your CameraIf your digital camera is less than a few years old, it probably came with a USB cable designed to plug into your PC. Fortunately, if your PC is young enough to run Windows XP, it probably has a USB jack, too. Furthermore, Windows XP comes preloaded with drivers for hundreds of current camera models, generally sparing you the standard installation process described in Chapter 14. That's why, for most people, the instructions for transferring photos from the camera to the PC are as follows :
That's it ”there is no step 2. As shown in Figure 8-1, Windows XP automatically opens the Camera and Scanner Wizard, a series of screens that guides you through the process of selecting and then transferring the photos you want. Figure 8-1. Top left: When you connect the camera, you may be asked which editing program you want to open . Top right: Click "advanced users only" to work with the camera's memory card as though it's a disk. Middle left: The Clear All and Select All buttons can save time when you want to include, or exclude, only a few pictures. Middle right: Windows offers you the chance to create a new folder for the incoming pictures, and also to delete them from the camera after the transfer. Lower left: After the transfer, Microsoft invites you to spend some money. Lower right: Click Finish to open up the folder that now contains your pictures on the hard drive.NOTE If hooking up the camera produces the dialog box shown at the top of Figure 8-1, then you've installed some photo-management software of your own (maybe some that came with the camera). In that case, you have a choice: Either select that program to download and manage your photos or click Cancel to let XP do the job as described in these pages. Then open your My Pictures folder (Start My Pictures) and, at the left side of the window, click "Get pictures from camera or scanner." The various screens of the Camera Wizard take you through these steps:
8.1.2 Fun with Downloaded PicturesOnce you've transferred pictures to your hard drive, you can enjoy a long list of photo-manipulation features, new in Windows XP. These features put to shame the national photo-management system: shoving drugstore prints into a shoebox, which then goes into a closet.
Suppose you've opened a folder of freshly downloaded pictures. (As noted above, they're usually in a folder in your My Pictures folder, which itself is in your My Documents folder. Unless you've deliberately removed My Pictures from your Start menu, just choose its name from the Start menu to get going. Or you can put a shortcut icon for My Pictures right on your desktop, as described in Section 3.4.3.) Here are some of the ways you can manage your pictures after their safe arrival on your PC. 8.1.2.1 Download more photosWhen a camera or scanner is turned on and connected to the PC, the first link in the task pane of your My Pictures folder is, "Get pictures from camera or scanner." Click it to launch the Camera and Scanner Wizard all over again. 8.1.2.2 Look them overWindows XP comes with two folder window views especially designed for digital photos: Thumbnail and Filmstrip. You can read about them on Section 3.2.1; for now, it's enough to note that Filmstrip view (Figure 8-2) is ideal for reviewing a batch of freshly transferred pictures at the size that's big enough for you to recognize them. Figure 8-2. In filmstrip view, the enlarged image shows the currently selected photo. You can select a different one for enlargement by clicking another image icon (bottom row) or by clicking the Previous and Next buttons beneath the selected photo. Don't miss the special tasks listed in the task pane at the left side ”or the options in the menu that appear when you right-click the central enlarged image.Remember to press the F11 key to maximize the window and hide a lot of the ancillary toolbar junk that eats into your photo-displaying space. (Press F11 again to restore the window size when you're done.) Also remember to rotate the photos that were taken with the camera turned sideways , especially if you plan to use the slide show, Web page, or email features described in the following paragraphs. NOTE When rotating a photo in Filmstrip view (Figure 8-2), Windows sometimes announces: "Because of the dimensions of this picture, rotating it might permanently reduce its quality. Do you want to proceed?" This scary message pops up only when you're trying to rotate a photo whose dimensions (measured in pixels) aren't an even multiple of sixteen. Windows is letting you know that, thanks to a quirk in the science of JPEG compression, it must recompress the graphic in order to rotate it. Microsoft says that the "quality loss" is imperceptible to the human eye, and you'll probably agree. But if you're worried about it, make a copy of the original photo file before you rotate it. 8.1.2.3 Start a slide showWhen you click "View as a slide show" in the task pane, your screen goes dark, thunder rumbles somewhere, and your entire monitor fills with a gorgeous, self-advancing slide show of the pictures in the folder. If you then move the mouse, a tiny palette appears in the upper-right corner with buttons of control buttons that correspond to Play, Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop. The beauty of a slide show like this is that everyone at your presentation (or, if this is your home computer, in your family) can see it at once. It beats the pants off the ritual of passing out individual 4 x 6 drugstore prints to each person. To stop the slide show, press the Esc key on your keyboard (or click the X button in the floating palette that appears when you move your mouse). NOTE Why do photo- related tasks appear on the task pane only in the My Pictures folder? Because Microsoft has applied the Pictures or Photo Album folder template to it. You can make these tasks appear in any other folder, however, just by applying the same folder template; see Section 3.2.1. 8.1.2.4 Order prints onlineIf you click this link in the task pane, Windows XP presents a wizard that helps you select photos in your folder for uploading to an online photo processor, like Kodak, Shutterfly, or Fuji. You can specify how many copies you want of each print, and at what sizes (Figure 8-3). Once you've plugged in your credit card number, the prints arrive by mail in about a week. Figure 8-3. The price for prints via Web is usually 50 cents for 4 x 6 prints, and up to $20 for a 20 x 30 inch poster. Be especially careful when you see the red minus symbol shown here. It lets you know that the reso-lution of that photo is too low to make a good quality print at that size. A 640 x 480 “pixel shot, for example, will look grainy when printed at 5 x 7 inches.8.1.2.5 Make a printoutThis task-pane link, too, opens a wizard. This time, it guides you through a selection of photos in your folder to print, a selection of printers to use, and the layout of photos on each 8 ½ x 11 sheet (four 3 x 5 inch prints, 9 wallet-sized prints, and so on). Note that many of these layouts chop off parts of your pictures to make them fit the page; the layout previews will reveal exactly which parts of the image you'll lose. 8.1.2.6 Install new wallpaperThe "Set as desktop background" link (which appears whenever you've highlighted a picture) plasters the currently selected photo across the entire background of your screen, turning your PC into the world's most expensive picture frame. (For instructions on changing or removing this background, use the Display program described in Section 9.7.) 8.1.2.7 Post the photos on the WebIn the old days, creating and posting Web pages was a task fit only for geeks . In Windows XP, however, anybody can create a gallery of photos that hangs on the Web for everyone in the world to see. Start by clicking "Publish this file ([folder] if no file is selected) to the Web" in the task pane at the left side of your pictures folder window. Yes, it's the Web Publishing Wizard, whose screens walk you through this process:
At last, Windows uploads your reduced-size photos to the Internet, which can take some time. The final wizard screen offers you the chance to go online, opening your browser automatically to the new Web page. 8.1.2.8 Email photosPhoto files destined for printing are much too massive for emailing . A single digital photo can occupy 2 MB of disk space or more, which would take until Thanksgiving to send by email. Even then, a photo file might never reach your recipient. If it overflows her email account's storage limit (typically 5 or 10 MB), it will just bounce back to you. Then you'll be forced to sit and wait while it downloads right back to you ”a fitting punishment for uploading such a big file to begin with! The solution is the "E-mail this file" link in the task pane of your pictures folder, which appears whenever you've highlighted at least one picture. Clicking this link produces the dialog box shown in Figure 8-5, which offers to smoothly reduce the dimensions of your pictures in the process of emailing them. Figure 8-5. Top: If you just click OK, the selected photos will get emailed at 640 x 480 pixel resolution ”just right for satisfactory viewing (and fairly speedy transferring) by email. Bottom: Clicking the "Show more options" link offers you the opportunity to specify which reduced size you want.Once you click OK, Windows automatically launches your email program and opens a new, outgoing email message, with the photo files (reduced in size, if that's what you specified) already attached. All you need to do is indicate the address, a subject line, and some comments (in the body of the message), if you like. NOTE At this point, you can drag the reduced-size picture attachments directly out of the email and back to your desktop, or to a waiting folder, without ever addressing or sending the message. Doing so capitalizes on the photo-shrinking power of the "E-mail this file" feature ”without actually emailing anything.
8.1.2.9 Create a photo screen saverThere's no "Create photo screen saver" link in the task pane of a photo folder, but Windows XP can still turn your favorite pictures into an automatic slide show whenever your computer isn't in use. Just right-click the desktop, choose Properties from the shortcut menu, click the Screen Saver tab in the resulting dialog box, and then choose My Pictures Slideshow from the "Screen saver" drop-down list. NOTE The screen saver is composed of photos in your My Pictures folder. If you'd like to choose a different folder as fodder for the slide show, click the Settings button, and then click the Browse button. You'll be offered the chance to choose any folder on your hard drive. From now on, whenever your PC has gone untouched for five minutes (or whatever interval you specify here), your pictures will fill the screen, complete with special transition effects between images, if you so choose. NOTE If you're the impatient sort , simply press the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard to summon the next or previous photo while the screen saver is playing. 8.1.2.10 View them biggerIf you double-click a picture or scan a file whose file type you haven't assigned to open in a particular graphics program (Section 6.9.2), it opens up in a program called Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. WPFV, as Windows veterans don't call it, is a strange , phantom little program. It doesn't show up in your Start menu and you can't find it by searching for it. You can only open it by double-clicking a graphic or by right-clicking a picture's icon and choosing Preview from the shortcut menu. The result is a simple preview window (Figure 8-6). At the bottom edge, you'll find buttons that do exactly the kinds of things you've been reading about: Show the previous or next image, start a slideshow, rotate the graphic, print it, email it, and so on. Figure 8-6. To learn what each button does, point to it without clicking. The Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons magnify or reduce the image on the screen, and the Delete button deletes the file from your hard drive (or, rather, flings it into the Recycle Bin).
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