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Windows Photo Gallery

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Template:Infobox Windows component Windows Photo Gallery is a photo management, tagging, and editing tool development by Microsoft, and is included with all editions of Windows Vista. Themed photo slideshows with smooth transitions are only available in the Home Premium and Ultimate editions. The direct path to the program is %ProgramFiles%\Windows Photo Gallery\WindowsPhotoGallery.exe

An upgraded version of Photo Gallery released under the Windows Live brand known as Windows Live Photo Gallery, can be installed using the Windows Live Installer, includes new features such as the viewing color histogram of an image, panoramic stitching and auto-tagging during importing and the ability to share photos by uploading them to Windows Live Spaces or Flickr.

Windows Photo Gallery is removed from Windows 7 in favour of its Windows Live counterpart, Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Features

Windows Photo Gallery provides the ability to organize digital photo collection in its Gallery view, by adding titles, rating, captions, and custom metadata tags to photos. An Edit mode is also present, which allows photos to be edited for exposure or color correction. It also provides other basic photo editing functions, such as resizing, cropping, red-eye reduction etc, and also allows printing photos, via the Photo Printing Wizard.

There is limited support for tagging and managing video files, though not editing them. It integrates with Windows DVD Maker to provide integrated DVD burning features. Windows Photo Gallery can also be used to acquire photos and videos from digital cameras, scanners, and other sources.

Format support

Windows Photo Gallery uses the Windows Imaging Component framework, that can be used by any codec to integrate with the image handling capabilities of the operating system and other applications that use WIC. Windows Vista ships with codecs for common formats like BMP, JPG, PNG, TIFF and HD Photo. However, GIF images do not appear in the gallery.[1] (workaround: rename the .gif files to .jpg)

By means of WIC which is included in Windows Vista and also available for Windows XP, developers can provide support for any image format at the operating system level.[2] Some camera vendors have developed WIC codecs for their proprietary RAW image formats. Windows Photo Gallery detects when a codec is needed, and provides a link to the relevant download location for the codec. If the appropriate codecs are installed, RAW images can be viewed by double-clicking them. However, Windows Photo Gallery does not automatically associate with RAW or other image file extensions for which codecs have been installed. Also, the touch-up capabilities are disabled for RAW images. As of November 2007, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus and Pentax have released WIC codecs.[3] A commercial DNG codec is also available from Ardfry Imaging. [4]

Tagging

Windows Photo Gallery uses the concept of hierarchical tagging (e.g. People/Jim, Places/Paris).[citation needed] It does not have the ability to group tags in the same manner as Photoshop software. Also, deleting a tag from Windows Photo Gallery will also remove it from all photos in the utility.

Adobe Systems's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata standard, a descendent of the ubiquitous Exif standard which almost all digital cameras currently support, is also supported. This allows for data such as the tags to be stored and edited much more efficiently than Exif or IPTC. However, edits to XMP data on JPEG images will not be visible on photos if they are transferred to a Windows XP-based system. Date tags, for example, will revert to their original Exif information even if XMP-related changes have been made.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Windows Help and How-to: Choose which pictures and videos are displayed in Windows Photo Gallery". Microsoft. Retrieved 2007-04-28.
  2. ^ "RAW Support in Windows Vista". Microsoft PhotoBlog. MSDN Blogs. January 23 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ Windows Vista Team Blog : Understanding RAW Image Support in Windows Vista
  4. ^ DNG Thumbnail and Preview Support for Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photo Gallery
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