7.1. Windows Photo GalleryYour digital camera is brimming with photos. You've snapped the perfect graduation portrait, captured that jaw-dropping sunset over the Pacific, or compiled an unforgettable photo essay of your 2-year-old attempting to eat a bowl of spaghetti. It's time to use your PC to gather, organize, and tweak all these photos so you can share them with the rest of the world. And that's a job for Photo Gallery. To open Photo Gallery, choose its name from the Start Programs menu, or double-click a photo in your Pictures folder. You arrive at the programs main window, the basic elements of which are shown in Figure 7-1.
7.1.1. Getting Pictures into Photo GalleryThe very first time you open it, Photo Gallery displays all the digital photos it can find in your Pictures folder (Start Pictures). This is important: you're looking at the actual files on your hard drive. If you delete a picture from Photo Gallery, you've just deleted it from your PC. (Well, OK, you've actually moved it to your Recycle Bin. But still, that's a step closer to oblivion.) 7.1.1.1. Photos from a digital cameraEvery modern camera comes with a USB cable that connects to your PC. That's handy, because it makes the photo-transfer process happen practically by itself.
Either way, unless you've turned off this option in Options, Photo Gallery now invites you to apply a tag to each of the incoming photos. Typing in a name for each new batch Disney, First Weekend or Baby Meets Lasagna , for examplewill help you organize and find your pictures later on. In either case, Windows sets about sucking in all the photos from the camera and placing them into your Pictures folder. Not all loose and squirmingthat'd be a mess. Instead, it neatly creates subfolders , named for today's date and whatever tag you gave this batch (for example, "2007-2-15 Ski Trip"). Each photo gets auto- renamed , too, according to the tag (Ski Trip 001.jpg, Ski Trip 002.jpg, and so on), on the premise that you'll find those names more helpful than the names the camera gave them (DSC_IMG_0023.jpg, for example). This "Tag these pictures" dialog box also offers a direct link to the Options box shown in the box on the facing page. Note: Most cameras these days can also capture cute little digital movies. Photo Gallery can import and organize them, as long as they're in .wmv, .asf, .mpeg, or .avi format. (Unfortunately, that list doesn't include .mov, a common movie format of digital cameras .)You don't have to do anything special to import movies; they get slurped in automatically. If you double-click one, it opens up and begins to play immediately. 7.1.2. The Post-Dump SlideshowIf you're like most people, the first thing you want to do after dumping the photos from your camera into your PC is to see them at full size, filling your screen. That's the beauty of Photo Gallery's slideshow feature. To begin the slideshow, specify which pictures you want to see. For example:
Now click the unlabeled Play button at the bottom of the window (see Figure 7-3)or just hit F11. Photo Gallery fades out of view, and a big, brilliant , full-screen slideshow of the new photosand even self-playing videosbegins.
What's really useful is the slideshow control bar shown in Figure 7-3. You make it appear by wiggling your mouse as the show begins. Click Exit, or press any key, to end the slideshow. 7.1.3. The Digital ShoeboxIf 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. 7.1.3.1. The Bigger PictureIf 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." 7.1.3.2. The Navigation Tree The Navigation tree at the left side of the window grows as you import more pictures and organize thembut right off the bat, you'll find icons like these:
7.1.4. Working with Your PhotosAll 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:
7.1.4.1. Selecting PhotosTo 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:
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. 7.1.4.2. Deleting PhotosAs 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 pressing 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. 7.1.4.3. The Info Paneland photo namesBehind 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 7-6), 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.
Here, you can rename a photo easily enough. Just click its existing name in the Info panel, and then retype. 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. 7.1.5. Tags and RatingsTags are descriptive keywordslike family , vacation , or kids that you can use to label and categorize your photos and videos. Ratings are, of course, star ratings from 0 to 5, meaning that you can categorize your pictures by how great they are. The beauty of tags and ratings is that they're searchable. Want to comb through all the photos in your library to find every closeup taken of your children during summer vacation? Instead of browsing through dozens of folders, just click the tags kids , vacation , closeup , and summer in the Navigation tree . You'll have the results in seconds. Or want to gather only the cream of the crop into a slideshow or DVD? Let Photo Gallery produce a display of only your five-star photos. Microsoft offers you a few sample entries in the Tags list to get you rolling: Landscape, Travel, and so on. But these are intended only as starting points. You can add as many new tag labels as you want to create a meaningful, customized list. To build your list, click "Create a New Tag" in the Navigation tree (Figure 7-7). Type the tag label and click OK.
To edit or delete a tag, right-click it, and then, from the shortcut menu, choose Delete or Rename. 7.1.5.1. Applying Tags and RatingsThe best way to apply tags to photos is, paradoxically, to apply the photos to the tags . That is, drag relevant photos directly onto the tags in the Navigation tree, as shown in Figure 7-7. To give a photo a new star rating, drag its thumbnail onto the appropriate row in the Navigation tree. Tip: You can apply as many tags to an individual photo as you like. A picture of your cousin Rachel at a hot dog- eating contest in London might bear all these keywords: Relatives, Travel, Food, Humor, and Medical Crises. Later, you'll be able to find that photo no matter which of these categories you're hunting for. 7.1.5.2. Using Tags and RatingsThe big payoff for your diligence arrives when you need to get your hands on a specific set of photos, because Photo Gallery lets you isolate them with one quick click. To round up all the photos with, say, the Kids tag, just click Kids in the Navigation tree at the left side of the window. Photo Gallery immediately rounds up all photos labeled with that tag, displays them in the photo-viewing area, and hides all others. Or, to find all your five-star photos, click the row of five stars in the Navigation tree. More tips: 7.1.6. Editing Your ShotsStraight from the camera, digital snapshots often need a little bit of help. A photo may be too dark or too light. The colors may be too bluish or too yellowish. The focus may be a little blurry, the camera may have been tilted slightly, or the composition may be somewhat off. Fortunately, Photo Gallery lets you fine-tune digital images in ways that, in the world of traditional photography, would require a fully equipped darkroom, several bottles of smelly chemicals, and an X-Acto knife . All Photo Gallery editing is performed in a special editing mode, in which the photo appears at nearly full-screen size, and tool icons appear at the top (Figure 7-8). You enter Edit mode by double-clicking a photo's thumbnail, either in Photo Gallery or in an Explorer window, and then clicking the Fix button on the toolbar.
You exit Edit mode by clicking "Back To Gallery" (top left of the window). 7.1.7. Ten Levels of UndoAs long as you remain in Edit mode, you can back out of your last 10 changes. To change your mind about the last change you made, just click the Undo button at the bottom of the Fix pane. To retrace even more of your steps, click the button next to the Undo button. The resulting pop-up menu lists your last 10 editing steps. Choose how far you want to "rewind," or click Undo All to back out of everything youve done since opening the photo. 7.1.8. Auto AdjustThe Auto Adjust button provides a simple way to improve the appearance of less-than -perfect digital photos. One click makes colors brighter, skin tones warmer, and details sharper. (If you've used Photoshop, the Enhance button is a lot like the Auto Levels command.) 7.1.9. CroppingThink of Photo Gallery's cropping tool as a digital paper cutter . It neatly shaves off unnecessary portions of a photo, leaving behind only the part of the picture you really want. You'd be surprised at how many photographs can benefit from selective cropping. You can eliminate parts of a photo you just don't want, improve a photo's composition (filling the frame with your subject often has greater impact), or fit a photo to specific proportions (an important step if you're going to turn your photos into standard-size prints). Here are the steps for cropping a photo:
7.1.10. Red-EyeRed-eye is light reflected back from your subject's eyes. The bright light of your flash passes through the pupil of each eye, illuminating and bouncing off of the blood-red retinal tissue at the back of the eye. Red-eye problems worsen when you shoot pictures in a dim room, because your subject's pupils are dilated wider, allowing even more light from the flash to shine on the retina . The best course of action is to avoid red-eye to begin withby using an external flash, for example. But if it's too late for that, and people's eyes are already glowing demonically, there's always Photo Gallery's Red-Eye tool. To fix red-eye, zoom in and scroll so that you have a closeup view of the eye with the red-eye problem. Click the Red-Eye button, and then drag a box around each affected eye. With each click, Photo Gallery neutralizes the red pixels, painting the pupils solid black. Of course, this means that everybody winds up looking like they have black eyes instead of red onesbut at least they look a little less like the walking undead.. 7.1.11. RotateUnless your digital camera has a built-in orientation sensor, Photo Gallery imports all photos in landscape orientation (wider than they are tall). The program has no way of knowing if you turned the camera 90 degrees when you took your pictures. To turn them right-side up, click one of the blue Rotate buttons at the bottom of the main Photo Gallery window. 7.1.12. Exposure and Color AdjustmentsPlenty of photos need no help at all. They look fantastic right out of the camera. And plenty of others are ready for prime time after only a single click on the Auto Adjust button, as described earlier. If you click Exposure or Adjust Color on the Fix pane, though, you can make gradations of the changes that the Auto Adjust button makes. For example, if a photo looks too dark and murky, you can bring details out of the shadows without blowing out the highlights. If the snow in a skiing shot looks too bluish, you can de-blue it. If the colors don't pop quite enough in the prize-winning-soccer-goal shot, you can boost their saturation levels. In short, there are fixes the Adjust panels can make that no one-click magic button can touch. 7.1.13. Reverting to the OriginalPhoto Gallery includes built-in protection against overzealous editinga feature that can save you much grief . If you end up cropping a photo too much, or cranking up the brightness of a picture until it seems washed out, or accidentally turning someone's lips black with the Red-Eye tool, you can undo all your edits at once with the Revert command. Revert strips away every change you've ever made since the picture arrived from the camera. It leaves you with your original, unedited photoeven if it's been months or years since you made the changes. The secret of the Revert command: whenever you use any editing tools, Photo Gallerywithout prompting and without informing youinstantly makes a duplicate of your original file. With an original version safely tucked away, Photo Gallery lets you go wild on the copy. Consequently, you can remain secure in the knowledge that in a pinch , Photo Gallery can always restore an image to the state it was in when you first imported it. No longer must you make copies of your photos just so you'll have a safety copy if your edits don't work out, or dream up some elaborate naming and folder-filing scheme to accommodate them. To restore an original photo, undoing all cropping, rotation, brightness adjustments, and so on, double-click the thumbnail of an edited photo. Click Fix on the toolbar, and then click Revert (at the bottom of the Fix pane). Photo Gallery asks you to confirm the changeafter all, you're about to throw away all the editing you've done to this photo, which could represent a lot of time and effortand then, if you click OK, swaps in the original version of the photo. You're back where you started. 7.1.14. Finding Your AudienceThe last stop on your digital photos' cycle of greatness is, of course, a showing for other people. Photo Gallery offers several ways to make that happen. 7.1.15. Make PrintsIf you highlight some photo thumbnails, and then click Print (in the Photo Gallery toolbar), the pop-up menu offers you two choices:
7.1.16. SlideshowsSee "The Post-Dump Slideshow" on Section 7.1.2. 7.1.17. EmailThe most important thing to know about emailing photos is this: full-size photos are usually too big to email . Suppose, for example, that you want to send three photos along to some friendsterrific shots you captured with your 8-megapixel camera. Sending along just three shots would make at least a 9-megabyte package. It will take you a long time to send, and it will take your recipient a long time to download. Worse , the average high-resolution shot is much too big for the screen. It does you no good to email somebody an 8-megapixel photo (3264 x 2448 pixels) when his monitor's maximum resolution is only 1900 x 1200. If you're lucky, his graphics software will intelligently shrink the image to fit his screen; otherwise , he'll see only a gigantic nose filling his screen. Besides, the typical Internet account has a limited mailbox size. If the mail collection exceeds 5 MB or so, that mailbox is automatically shut down until it's emptied. Your massive photo package will push your hapless recipient's mailbox over its limit. She'll miss out on important messages that get bounced as a result. Photo Gallery solves these problems neatly, as shown in Figure 7-10.
Here's how the process works:
7.1.18. Make a Slideshow MovieIf you highlight some photo thumbnails and then click Make a Movie in the toolbar, Vista automatically hands them off to Movie Maker, Vista's basic video-editing program, and lays them out in the timeline as a slideshow, all ready to go. All you have left to do is rearrange them, add music and credits, and save as a digital movie file for distribution to your hip friends or publishing online. When you've finished setting up the slideshowthat is, screen saverclick Save. When you return to the Screen Saver Settings dialog box, you can either click Preview to manually trigger the screen saver for your inspection, or click OK and wait 20 minutes for the screen saver to kick in by itself. |