Windows Photo Gallery : The detailed review

[gxsaurav]

Windows Photo Gallery is the newly added feature in Windows Vista. It is by far the most simple & easiest to use Photo Management application in Windows. Due to this simplicity it does misses out some photo editing features which other professional image managers like ACDSee provides, but for home users who want to manage their collection of thousands of Photo at once, it is a deal hard to resist as it comes integrated with the OS.

When first opening, this is how Windows Photo Gallery looks like.




It shows previews of all your images & videos inside the “My Pictures” & “My Videos” folder. However, you can add any other folder to the gallery using File tab -> Add Folder to gallery. Now you do not require to keep your pictures in the default “My Pictures” Folder, you can keep them anywhere you want & still you will be able to manager them easily.

Upon first importing, it will check the dates & tags available in all pictures & show you a tree navigation. The inclusion of instant search in Windows Vista is integrated in Photo Gallery too, due to which you can search for any photo which is in the library using the search bar.

The Tree Navigation provides access to your pictures by folder, or date, by tag or by rating. You can use it the way you want to. There are no restriction on how you it. It doesn’t provide feature or Rolls like iPhoto does, but who needs rolls when u can sort or manage using tags or date anyway.




Using the tabs given above in the toolbar, you can do basic tasks like get Info about the photo like name, time taken, size, resolution & ratings. To change the properties of any image like time taken or change the camera model, just do the usual thing. Right click on the image & select properties, there you have it, change whatever you like.



You can also do some basic digital image fixing like auto colour correction, exposure correction, crop, red eye removal. Although these are meant only for image management, some more features like adding caption or text or blurring some part would have been good. Although you can use the free Paint.net to do that easily.

You can directly print, burn, make a movie or open the image with some external photo editor such as Photoshop. Even start a slideshow from the Photo Gallery application itself.



The file formats that Windows Photo Gallery supports can be extended easily using 3rd party plug-ins. It already supports RAW images of digital camera & due to using Vista’s Windows Imaging Component Framework based on WPF, all the images you see are hardware accelerated on the monitor screen.

Using colour management profiles available in Windows you can also print these the way you see it.

Windows Photo Gallery is not supposed to be a replacement for ACDSee or Adobe Lightroom, it is for those who don’t want to spend extra money for Image Management. It is made for image management which it does perfectly, out of the box in Windows Vista. Just start Windows & start using it.

[shantanu]

Great features !! and your explanation excellent..
well i use paint.net in XP and Photo gallery in Vista.

[goobimama]

Hey how do I resize an image in Photo Gallery?

[gxsaurav]

You can't. I have already mentioned that Windows Photo Gallery is a Photo Manager & not an editor. iPhoto has better editing capabilities but bad Management features.

Goobi, you require paint.net, a free application for such tasks. This is already mentioned above. I m bolding it to make it clear.

[goobimama]

No no no. I'm not comparing it to iPhoto, which is way beyond (couldn't resist . I've installed some VSO Image Resizer for the same. Just thought maybe the option to resize is there somewhere hidden in Photo Gallery...

[gxsaurav]

Lolz....Ok. But keep in mind that iPhoto is not a feature of MacOS X, it comes as part of iLife which is not bundled in old version of OS. You need to buy it for $70 I guess. Well, if we consider buying then check out ACDSee for Windows which we all know pwnes both WPG & iPhoto.

Why r u using VSO Image resizer. If you don't have Photoshop for Windows then just use Paint.net which Microsoft should have acquired & integrated in Windows Vista.

[goobimama]

Well it serves the purpose. Right click image > Resize.

[gxsaurav]

Pally, thats a 3rd party application. If it comes to that we can install anything. I am talking about default inbuild image management in Windows Vista

[Vishal Gupta]

Nice and detailed review.

[anandk]

Thanx for the cool review..

[adithyagenius]

Irfanview is good too. Version 4 is out. Download the plugins as well.