Section 13.4. The Digital Shoebox: All Versions | Windows Vista: The Missing Manual

13.4. The Digital Shoebox: All Versions

If you've imported your photos into Photo Gallery using any of the methods described above, you should now see a neatly arranged grid of thumbnails in Photo Gallery's main photo-viewing area. This is, presumably, your entire photo collection, including every last picture you've ever importedthe digital equivalent of that old shoebox you've had stuffed in the closet for the last 10 years .

Your journey out of chaos has begun. From here, you can sort your photos, give them titles, group them into smaller sub-collections (called albums ), and tag them with keywords so you can find them quickly.

13.4.1. The Bigger Picture

If you point to a photo thumbnail without clicking, Photo Gallery is kind enough to display, at your cursor tip, a larger version of it. Think of it as a digital version of the magnifying loupe that art experts use to inspect gemstones and paintings.

Tip: If this feature gets on your nerves, choose File

Options, and then turn off "Show picture and video previews in tooltips."

13.4.2. The Navigation Tree

Even before you start naming your photos, assigning them keywords, or organizing them into albums, Photo Gallery imposes an order of its own on your digital shoebox.

The key to understanding it is the Navigation tree at the left side of the Photo Gallery window. This list grows as you import more pictures and organize thembut right off the bat, you'll find icons like these:

All Pictures and Videos . The first icon in the Navigation tree is a very reassuring little icon, because no matter how confused you may get in working with subsets of photos later in your Photo Gallery life, clicking this icon returns you to your entire picture collection. It makes all of your photos and videos appear in the viewing area.

Click the Pictures or Videos subhead to filter out the thumbnails so that only photos or only videos are visible.
Recently imported . Most of the time, you'll probably work with the photos that you just downloaded from your camera. Conveniently, Photo Gallery always tracks your most recently added batch, so you can view its contents without much scrolling.
Tags . As you work with your photos, you'll soon discover the convenience of adding tags (keywords) to them, like Family, Trips, or Baby Pix. Then, with one click on one of the tag labels in this list, you can see only the photos in your collection that match that keyword.

Tip: You can Ctrl-click several items in the Tags list at once. For example, if you want to see both Family photos and Vacation photos, click Family, then Ctrl-click Vacation.This trick also works to select multiple months, years, star-rating categories, or folders (described below).

Date Taken . Photo Gallery's navigation tree also offers miniature calendar icons named for the years (2005, 2006, 2007, and so on).

When you import photos, the program files each photo by the date you took it. You can click, say, the 2005 icon to see just the ones you took during that year.

By clicking the flippy triangle next to a year's name , furthermore, you expand the list to reveal the individual months in that year; click a month's flippy triangle to see the individual dates within that month. Photo Gallery shows only the months and dates in which you actually took pictures; that's why 2006, for example, may show only April, July, and October (Figure 13-6).

Figure 13-6. The year and month icons are very helpful when you're creating a slideshow or trying to pinpoint one certain photo. After all, you usually can remember what year you took a vacation or when someone's birthday was. These icons help you narrow down your search without requiring that you scroll through your entire library .

Ratings . As you'll read in a moment, you can give your pictures star ratings: one star (or none) for the turkeys, five stars for the really great ones that are shoo-ins for your Web page or annual year-end calendar.

These little rows of stars make it easy to sort your entire collection by rating. Click the row of five stars, for example, to see only your five-starrers.
Folders . At the bottom of the list, you'll see a collapsible list of the actual folders, sitting out there on your hard drive, that hold your photos and video clips. At the outset, you'll see only your Pictures and Videos folders (and maybe the Public versions of those, for use on a network). But as you add "watched folders" as described on page 425, this list will grow.

13.4.3. Working with Your Photos

All right: Enough touring Photo Gallery's main window. Now it's time to start using it.

Browsing, selecting, and opening photos is straightforward. Here's everything you need to know:

Use the vertical scroll bar, or your mouse's scroll wheel, to navigate through your thumbnails.
To create the most expansive photo-viewing area possible, you can temporarily hide the details pane at the right side of the window. To do so, click the tiny X button at its topjust under the ? button. (The red X above the Help button closes Photo Gallery.) Bring the Info pane back by clicking Info in the toolbar.

13.4.4. Category Groupings

Each time you import a new set of photos into Photo Gallerywhether from your hard drive, a camera, or a memory cardit appears with its own heading in Photo Gallery. Each batch is like one film roll you've had developed. Photo Gallery starts out sorting your Photo Library chronologically, meaning that the most recently imported photos appear at the top of the window.

Tip: If you'd prefer that the most recent items appear at the bottom of the Photo Gallery window instead of the top, open the Thumbnail View pop-up menu (Figure 13-7). From the pop-up menu, choose Sort By

Descending.

button at the right end of each horizontal line.

The "categories" don't have to be chronological. You can also ask Photo Gallery to cluster your photos into other logical groups: by rating (all the five-starrers together), by camera model, by month taken, and so on.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Your Own Personal Sorting Order

I want to put my photos in my own order. I'm making a slideshow, and I want to dictate the sequence. How do I do that?

You can't.

At least not without a lot of effortnamely, by manually renaming the photos so that their names are 000 Beach, 001 Sunset, and so on.

To rename a photo, click it once. See the Info pane at the right side of the window? (If not, click Info in the toolbar.) Click the photo's name to open its photo-editing box.

If you want to drag photos into a new ordersay, for the purposes of a slideshow movieyou have to do it in Movie Maker.

To fiddle with the groupings, open the Thumbnail View pop-up menu (identified in Figure 13-7). Choose the grouping criterion you want from the Group By submenu.

Within each group, you can specify how you want the photos sorted: chronologically by date taken or date modified, by file size , by rating, alphabetically by name, or whatever. These options, too, are hiding in the Thumbnail View pop-up menuthis time, in the Sort By submenu.

13.4.5. Selecting Photos

To highlight a single picture in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the thumbnail once with the mouse.

That much may seem obvious. But first-time PC users may not know how to manipulate more than one icon at a timean essential survival skill.

To highlight multiple photos in preparation for deleting, moving, duplicating, printing, and so on, use one of these techniques:

To select all the photos . Select all the pictures in the set you're viewing by pressing Ctrl+A (the equivalent of the Edit Select All command).

To select several photos by dragging . You can drag diagonally to highlight a group of nearby photos, as shown in Figure 13-8. You don't even have to enclose the thumbnails completely; your cursor can touch any part of any icon to highlight it. In fact, if you keep dragging past the edge of the window, the window scrolls automatically.

Figure 13-8. You can highlight several photos simultaneously by dragging a box around them. To do so, start from somewhere outside of the target photos and drag diagonally across them, creating a whitish enclosure rectangle as you go. Any photos touched by this rectangle are selected when you release the mouse .

To select consecutive photos . Click the first thumbnail you want to highlight, and then Shift-click the last one. All the files in between are automatically selected, along with the two photos you clicked (Figure 13-9, top). This trick mirrors the way Shift-clicking works in a word processor, the Finder, and many other kinds of programs.

Figure 13-9. Top: To select a block of photos (as indicated by the faint colored border on each one), click the first one, and then Shift-click the last one. Photo Gallery selects all the files in between your clicks .
Bottom: To select nonadjacent photos, Ctrl-click them. (To remove one of the photos from your selection, Ctrl-click it.)

To select random photos . If you only want to highlight, for example, the first, third, and seventh photos in a window, start by clicking photo icon No. 1. Then Ctrl-click each of the others. Each thumbnail sprouts colored shading to indicate that you've selected it (Figure 13-9, bottom).

If you're highlighting a long string of photos and then click one by mistake, you don't have to start over. Instead, just Ctrl-click it again, and the dark highlighting disappears. (If you do want to start over from the beginning, however, just deselect all selected photos by clicking any empty part of the window.)

The Ctrl-key trick is especially handy if you want to select almost all the photos in a window. Press Ctrl+A to select everything in the folder, then Ctrl-click any unwanted photos to deselect them. You'll save a lot of time and clicking.

Tip: You can also combine the Ctrl-clicking business with the Shift-clicking trick. For instance, you could click the first photo, then Shift-click the tenth, to highlight the first 10. Next, you could Ctrl-click photos 2, 5, and 9 to remove them from the selection.

Once you've highlighted multiple photos, you can manipulate them all at once. For example, you can drag them en masse out of the window and onto your desktopa quick way to export them.

In addition, when multiple photos are selected, the commands in the shortcut menu (right-click any one of them) apply to all of them simultaneouslylike Rotate, Copy, Delete, Rename, or Properties.

13.4.6. Deleting Photos

As every photographer knowsmake that every good photographernot every photo is a keeper. You can relegate items to the Recycle Bin by selecting one or more thumbnails, and then performing one of the following:

Right-click a photo, and then choose Delete from the shortcut menu.

Click the red, slashy X button at the bottom of the window.

Press the Delete key on your keyboard.

If you suddenly decide you don't really want to get rid of any of these trashed photos, it's easy to resurrect them. Switch to the desktop, open the Recycle Bin, and then drag the thumbnails out of the window and back into your Pictures folder.

(Of course, if you haven't deleted the imported pictures from your camera, you can still recover the original files and reimport them even after you empty the Recycle Bin.)

13.4.7. Duplicating a Photo

It's often useful to have two copies of a picture. For example, a photo whose dimensions are appropriate for a slideshow or desktop picture (that is, a 4:3 proportion) isn't proportioned correctly for ordering prints (4 x 6, 8 x 10, or whatever). To use the same photo for both purposes, you really need to crop two copies independently.

To make a copy of a photo, double-click its thumbnail to open it. Then choose File Make a Copy. Youre asked to name the duplicate and choose a folder location for it. Do so, and then click Save.

13.4.8. The Info Panel

Behind the scenes, Photo Gallery stores a wealth of information about each individual photo in your collection. To take a peek, highlight a thumbnail, and then click the Info button on the toolbar. A new pane appears at the right side of the window (Figure 13-10), or It reveals that picture's name, rating, creation time and date, dimensions (in pixels), file size, and any comments you've typed into the Captions area.

Figure 13-10. The Info pane isn't just a place to look at the details of your pictures. You can also edit a lot of it. You can even change the date a photo was takena good tip to remember if you're a defense attorney .

When multiple photos are selected, you see how many photos are selected.

When no photos are selected, the Info area displays how many pictures or movies are in the currently selected container in the Navigation treethe current album or film roll, for example.

How does Photo Gallery know so much about how your photos were taken? Most digital cameras embed a wealth of image, camera, lens, and exposure information in the photo files they create, using a standard data format called XMP or EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format). With that in mind, Photo Gallery automatically scans photos for XMP or EXIF data as it imports them (see Figure 13-11).

Figure 13-11. The Properties dialog box reports details about your photos by reading the XMP or EXIF tags that your camera secretly embeds in your files. This is even more information than you see in the Info pane (Figure 13-10) .
To open this box, right-click any photo in Photo Gallery. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties .

Note: Some cameras do a better job than others at embedding EXIF data in photo files. Photo Gallery can extract this information only if it's been properly stored by the camera when the digital photo is created. Of course, most of this information is missing altogether if your photos didn't come from a digital camera (if they were scanned in, for example).

13.4.8.1. Titles

You can rename a photo easily enough. Just click its existing name in the Info panel, and then retype.

Tip: Most people find this feature especially valuable when it comes to individual photographs. When you import them from your digital camera, the pictures bear useless gibberish names like CRS000321.JPG, CRS000322.JPG, and so on. If you highlight a bunch of photos and then change the title, you're renaming all of them at once. Photo Gallery even numbers them (Snowstorm 1.jpg, Snowstorm 2.jpg, and so on).

While you can make a photo's title as long as you want, it's smart to keep it short (about 10 characters or so). This way, you can see all or most of the title in the Title field (or under the thumbnails).

Tip: Once you've gone to the trouble of naming your photos, remember that you can make these names appear right beneath the thumbnails for convenient reference. Use the Thumbnail View pop-up menu (Figure 13-7) to make it so.

13.4.8.2. Dates

Weirdly enough, you can even edit the dates the pictures were takena handy fix if, for example, the camera's clock wasn't set right. Just click the date or time, and then either retype the date digits or click the button to open a clickable calendar.

13.4.8.3. Captions

Sometimes you need more than a one- or two-word title to describe a picture. If you want to add a lengthier description, you can type it in the Captions area of the Info pane (click where it says <Add Caption>). The box shows only two lines of text at a time, but it scrolls as necessary if you type more.

Even if you don't write full-blown captions for your pictures, you can use the Captions box to store little details such as the names, places, dates, and events associated with your photos.

The best thing about adding comments is that they're searchable. After you've entered all this free-form data, you can use it to quickly locate a photo using Photo Gallery's search command.

13.4.9. The Table of Contents (Quantity Graph)

You might not know the file names of the pictures you took during your trip to Canada a few years ago. You might not even remember which month it was exactly. But one thing's for sureyou know you took a ton of pictures in a very short time a couple summers ago. The Table of Contents view can show them to you.

You make the timeline appear by clicking the Thumbnail View icon (Figure 13-7), and then choosing Table of Contents from the pop-up menu. See Figure 13-12 for more details.

Figure 13-12. The headings of the timeline reflect whatever grouping style you've chosen from the Thumbnail View pop-up menu: date taken, file size, rating, folder, tag, camera, or whatever. What's handy here is the little bar graphs that show how many pictures you took within each grouping .

The resulting list of years shows you how many photos you took within each grouping (that is, each month, with each camera, within each rating group, and so on), thanks to the little bar graphs. As on a cellphone, the more bars you see, the greater the signal (that is, the more photos in that group).

Click a heading to see the photos in that category.