Organise your photo collection in Windows Vista

The digital camera revolution has freed us from the tedium and expense of developing film. In doing so, it has given us the power to fire off as many shots as we like until we get that one great picture that perfectly captures a mood, reveals a person’s character or creates an image just the way we had it in our heads. Taking great photos still isn’t easy, but with trial, effort and patience you can do it. Finding them on your hard drive, on the other hand, can be a lot tougher.

I’ve been taking digital photos for about five years now. Although I periodically clean down my hard drive by archiving all my images on to DVD, I’m back up to about 25GB of disk space in my Pictures folder already, and adding more each day. That’s a lot of photos to sort through every time I want to find a particular shot. I’ve tried many programs for categorising my photos and keeping track of them, and while several of them have had their good points, they all have faults - the most common being that they leave me little control over which folders they’re monitoring and why. Because of this, the browsing convenience they offer hasn’t been quite enough to justify using them over old fashioned Windows Explorer.

With Windows Vista, however, all the tools I need for keeping track of my shots and sorting them are there at my fingertips. The difference is apparent as soon as you plug a camera, mobile phone or memory card into your PC. A dialogue box pops up and asks if you want to transfer the shots from your camera on to your PC. Once you’ve agreed to this, Windows Vista presents you with the option to add a ‘tag’ (or keyword) to the images you’re transferring. So if, say, you’ve just got back from Land’s End and all your shots are of dark Cornish cliffs, you might want to say something about that here.

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By default, Windows Vista will then transfer all the files over to your Pictures folder, storing them in a subfolder named by the day of the transfer and the tag you’ve chosen – for example, the automatically generated folder might be called ‘10-Dec-2006 Land’s End’. You’ll also find that all the photos in the set have been renamed from the usual gibberish (such as ‘DSC03415.jpg’) to the rather more meaningful ‘Land’s End 1.jpg’ and ‘Land’s End 2.jpg’ and so on.

Where you take control

The heart of the new photography toolkit, though, is the Windows Photo Gallery application. It monitors the contents of your pictures folder – and any other folders you ask it to, including those on external hard drives – and presents you with an Explorer type thumbnail view of all the photos and videos stored there. You can alter the view to include bits of info attached to the image but normally hidden, including the name, time taken and any tags or keywords assigned.

I Am Undone - You can always revert to 'as taken'

This is where you can really start to take control of your photo collection. The panel on the right shows a variety of sorting tools – you can sort images by name, date taken, location on the hard drive, tag, star rating, or by clicking on the Recently Imported items to see only images taken from the camera in the last 30 days. On the far left-hand side is the ‘metadata’ (hidden info) for the selected image, and you can edit information such as name, time, date and caption.

Watch the Berdie - Brighten dull images at preview

If you select more than one shot and edit the information here, Windows Vista will apply the metadata to every file selected. Most importantly, if you rename a group of files it will add a consecutive number to each one – so I can quickly change my photo library from a rather random collection of files with arbitrary names to one which is sorted meaningfully and with usable tags.

One Touch - Auto adjust is good at picking up colours

My favourite feature of all, though, is being able to select multiple photos and drag them over a tag in the left hand pane – adding that tag to each shot in the selection. One of the most powerful sorting tools is the Star Rating. Once you’ve imported your images to your PC and edited the tags and names in Photo Gallery, you can scroll over them in the centre panel for an enlarged preview, or double-click on them to open them in a viewing window. Shots can then be given a rating from 0 to 5, a great way to single out the ones that you want to keep for posterity, without deleting anything. You can then find the best images quickly by clicking the rating you want to browse in the left-hand panel. Since I started using it, I’ve been discovering great photos from years ago that I’d forgotten I’d even taken.

Filed for the future

The suite is rounded off with some basic editing tools. What stands out about these is the ease with which you can use them. Simply click Fix and drag the Exposure slider to bring light where once was only darkness, or hit Auto Adjust to have Photo Gallery run it through the system for you. That one click can transform indistinct blobs into stunning family shots – perfect for those of us whose photography skills have still got a bit of room to develop. And no matter how long you’ve been using a digital camera, that’s probably true of all of us.

Take the shot

The most important thing about creating a good photo gallery is taking a good picture in the first place. There are lots of great photography websites offering tips on improving your technique. Try checking out www.dcmag.co.uk for inspiration.

Transfer Across

When you come to download your images to your computer, a card reader is the easiest way of getting shots across. Failing that, just plug your camera in. Windows Vista will recognise the images, and ask you if you want to transfer them.

Raw Meat

At the time of writing, Photo Gallery can’t read camera RAW files, but all the camera manufacturers are working on software to add this in, which will automatically be downloaded on release. In the meantime, you’ll have to use JPGs or TIFF files for pictures.

Tag Lines

Adding a tag at this point will rename your images, and will file them in a folder using the same label. You can change how Windows Vista handles the transfer by clicking on the Options button. Check the Erase after importing box to keep your camera card clean.

Into The Gallery

Now open up Windows Photo Gallery. Your pictures will be there, renamed and tagged. You can do an initial sort through by rating each image from one to five stars, and then pare down your collection ready for browsing or sharing.

Adam Oxford contributes to Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, and is a veteran technology journalist.

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