Tag, organise, filter and fix your digital photos in Windows Vista

With Windows Vista, Microsoft has taken Windows XP's photo organising features, sent them to the gym, made them eat their greens, put them through finishing school and then given them a makeover. In other words, the Windows Vista Photo Gallery is really rather good. When you first run Windows Vista you'll find it pinned to the Start menu; if you've been using Vista for a while then it's only an extra click away (Start > All Programs > Windows Photo Gallery).

Everything everywhere

The first time you run the Photo Gallery it'll show every kind of image and video in your folders. If you click on the Thumbnail View icon to the left of the search box you can change the view, for example by getting Windows Vista to sort or group your images by date, size or other criteria.

No clips

While it's handy to see video and photos together, sometimes – like now – you might not be interested in video. No problem: at the top left of the window just click on Pictures.

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Photo Gallery will now show your images but not your video clips.

Tag views

You can also filter the list by tags (as we've done here), star ratings or date by clicking on the appropriate links in the left hand of the screen. In this screenshot we're only looking at pictures that we've tagged with our dog's name.

Big picture

To see an image in all its glory, double-click on it. You'll see that at the right of the screen you can add tags, change the star rating or add a caption.

Easy edit

You can fix common image problems from within the Photo Gallery. Click on the Fix toolbar button and you'll see five options at the right: auto adjust, adjust exposure, adjust color, crop picture and fix red eye.

Auto adjust

If you click on Auto Adjust the Photo Gallery attempts to make the colours in your photo as accurate as possible. You'll see that ticks now appear next to Auto Adjust and Adjust Color so you can see at a glance what changes have been made. You can click Undo at any time if you change your mind.

Bright ideas

Click on the Adjust Exposure link to adjust the image's brightness and contrast. You can now use the sliders to make the image brighter or to boost the contrast (the difference between the brightest and darkest bits of the image).

Quick fix

As you adjust the sliders you'll see the results instantly. In this example we've gone for a fairly extreme adjustment that almost gets rid of the image background.

Quick crop

Photo Gallery also enables you to crop images, which is handy if – as in this example – the interesting bit of the image could be made bigger. Simply click on Crop Picture and then either choose from one of the drop-down options – useful if you want to crop your picture to fit a particular paper size – or use the mouse to crop the image manually. Click on Apply to make the changes.

Bigger picture

Here you can see the results of our crop. It's a good way of removing unnecessary bits from a photo, and there's an Undo button if you get carried away and crop more than you intended to.

Print your pics

You can print photos from within Photo Gallery. Click on the image you want to print and then click on the Print toolbar button. Choose Print… and you'll see the dialogue box shown here, which enables you to change the paper size, selected printer, print quality or page layout.

Easy albums

If you're printing multiple photos at once, try experimenting with the different page layouts along the right-hand side of the dialogue box. These enable you to print images in a variety of ways – two to a page, four to a page, nine to a page and so on – and Windows Vista automatically resizes the images so the results are perfect.

Advanced options

Click on the Options link to see more features. By default the Photo Gallery sharpens images to make them as clear as possible, although you can turn this option off if you prefer. For serious printing, for example where the colours on the page have to match the colours on screen exactly, you can click on Color Management to calibrate your monitor and printer for accurate colour reproduction.

Easy CD

If you want to share your photos with others you can email them by clicking on the Email toolbar button, but if you've got lots of high resolution images then a CD or DVD is a better bet. You don't need separate software to burn a disc: simply select the images you want to copy to disc and then click on Burn in the toolbar. And that's it.

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