Six fun things to do with your summer photos

The summer holidays - a time when your digital camera is being put to use the most. Although photos from digital cameras store great memories, often they are hidden away with hundreds of others on your hard drive instead of being displayed and shared with friends and family to make the most out of Windows Vista.

Photos can be tagged using Windows Live Photo Gallery to make it easier to find specific shots or events. If you don’t already have this service you can download it for free here. Tagging makes it easier to find specific photos as words can be searched for in the search bar to instantly display relevant photos. Photos can have as many tags as needed and multiple shots can be selected to tag at the same time, which is particularly useful if there are a large amount of pictures.

Before displaying or sharing photos they can be edited in the ‘Fix’ section of Windows Live Photo Gallery. Red eyes can be removed and photos can be cropped or adjusted. Auto adjust is a useful tool which will change the colour, brightness and contrast of the photo to optimize its appearance.

When you are happy with your photos they can be printed out, e-mailed to friends or uploaded to your website, for example your Windows Live Space. Photos can be uploaded into albums and people can comment on them, which is perfect to accompany a blog. This free service is the ideal way for anyone you know to see what you have been getting up to or vice versa.

Follow these guides to creatively show off your photos:

CREATE A PANORAMA
Use several scenic shots to create one large photo in Windows Live Gallery, which is perfect to show off your holiday locations. To use this application, multiple photos of the same location are needed with each shot slightly varying in position. The application will then stitch them together to create one long photo which can then be cropped or edited. This means that if you see a beautiful view you don’t have to try and squeeze it all into one photo anymore!.

MAKE A DVD
It’s an exciting, interactive way to show people your holiday snaps - all you need is a blank DVD and Windows DVD Maker. Select some photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery and click on Make --> Burn a DVD to start up the wizard, where you can add additional photos, choose a menu style, add music and edit menu text. Once it has been burned to the DVD it can be played on PCs and DVD players. DVDs can also be made using home videos from your digital camera or video recorder.

CREATE A SCREENSAVER
This can contain all of your photos (or from one specific folder) to personalise your PC.  Choose Screensaver from the Personalisation section of the Control Panel then select Windows Live Photo Gallery from the drop down list. To customize the screensaver further you can choose which folders to use photos from, how often to change the picture and whether to shuffle them or leave them in order from the Settings menu.

PERSONALISE YOUR DESKTOP
Use one of your own photos as a background on your PC. This can be done by right clicking the photo you would like to use and selecting Set as desktop background. Alternatively you can have more options by using the Desktop Background section in the Personalisation area of the Control Panel. Here you can choose whether to tile the image, fit it to the screen or to leave it as its current size. If you wish to use the latter option you can set a background colour to appear behind the picture.

UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS
Use your own website or Windows Live Space to flaunt your photos. Once you are logged in to your Live Space page select Share Photos, where you can put photos to an album or create several albums for each holiday or day out. Photos can be dragged and dropped into order and albums or photos can be deleted. Add a theme or different layout to your Live Space page to personalise the background to your albums and the rest of your pages.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR LOGIN
You can have a personal photo instead of a default Windows Vista image as your login picture. This looks great if you have more than one account as each person can have a photo of themselves. To do this, click on the small photo at the top of the menu bar and select Change your picture from the options. Browse for more photos to find a photo you like. If you want to focus on a particular section of the photo you can crop it using Windows Live Photo Gallery, but make sure to save it separately so the original is not lost.