Windows Photo Gallery in Vista Shines

Michael Gartenberg | March 13, 2007, 09:43 AM

I love photography although I am hardly a photographer like Thomas Hawk. I've been a digital camera user for more than a decade but have never really found a program that I liked to manage my collection and I've tried them all. The problem is that they all wanted me to work the way they did instead of respecting the way I wanted to work. Over the years, I've cataloged pictures on my hard drive by Year > Event Folder. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. Other programs I've tried on just didn't work the way I wanted too and I eventually gave up on using them. On the Mac, the choice is simple, iLife works great for managing my pictures but photo management for Windows has lagged for my needs.

Windows Photo Gallery is a great solution for photo management, mostly because it lets me work the way I want to work and it's one of my favorite features in Vista. I love how Vista respects my folder directory structure but also lets me view by date or tags if I choose to. The choice is mine. Editing the metadata and tagging is easy and allows me to update the thousands of pictures in my library at my own pace. More importantly, for many older pictures that lack embedded information from cameras, I can properly adjust their dates.

Finally, I can do basic image editing directly in Windows and Vista will preserve the original picture as a "digital negative" that I can revert back to at any time. Excellent!. Photo Gallery also has one of the best software fixes for red eye that I have used. It works even better on a tablet, when I can use my pen to select areas with greater accuracy.

So far, Photo Gallery and the Photo Gadget are two of my favorite new Vista features. If you're into digital photography even in a modest way, this feature alone may be worth the price of admission. Now if only Microsoft had updated the bundled paint program to do a little more but i'll cover that in another post.

Is it perfect? Well, No. There's going to be a several scenarios where you might not want to use Photo Gallery. According to a support bulletin

When you edit the properties of a photo to add metadata in Windows Vista, the third-party software that is included with the digital camera may no longer recognize some proprietary metadata that the digital camera automatically adds to the photo. This metadata is specific to the manufacturer of the camera.

This is really only a problem if you use software that reads the maker note EXIF tag, so for many users, it won't be an issue but if you're in this category, stay away. I've also seen reports of issues with some camera vendors RAW images, this is core problem with the RAW format, as there's no standard at the moment for RAW images so vendors often have specs that are a little different. I don't shoot RAW for a lot of reasons but if you do, you'll want to check and see if there's a plug-in for Vista from the vendor.