Microsoft Photo Gallery

Microsoft Photo Gallery allows you to crop, adjust exposure and colour and fix red eye. Adjustments of exposure and colour can be done automatically with nothing more than a click of a button or adjustments can be made manually.

Microsoft Photo Gallery sounds like it does just that with the exception of the lightweight part. That remains to be seen. I was suprised when I first used Microsoft Photo Gallery because I wasn’t really expecting much but I ended up tagging and organizing without even realizing it something that never happened with iPhoto or Adobe Elements. Really liked it and despite some obvious flaws think it is actually pretty underated.

Microsoft Photo Gallery is a great solution for photo management, mostly because it lets you work the way you 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.

Microsoft Photo Gallery is a powerful tool for organizing, editing, and displaying the digital pictures. If a person is a digital photo enthusiast, he will save time sifting through new pictures, fixing pictures that aren't quite right, and finding pictures when it's time to print or share them. Microsoft Photo Gallery lets users organize their 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.

Microsoft Photo Gallery always modifies the original in the location where it’s at which is convenient, and then it saves a copy of the original in its own folder which makes more sense. Microsoft Photo Gallery supplies all the tools that an amateur digital photographer needs and is one of the easiest to use applications. It is seamlessly integrated with other Microsoft applications to share digital content.

users

User can create a flash photo gallery or photo album with just a few mouse clicks. The photo gallery can then be placed on website, CDROM or used as a stand alone application. Users can now right-click on an image file to resize that image. You can even select multiple images and resize them together ( batch resize was a popular feature request by users).

Vista Issues

Vista appears to have some issue with displaying jpeg images using the built-in Microsoft Photo Gallery. If you open up a jpeg photo it will appear like sepia or have a yellow tint to the photo. Vista seems to take forever just bringing up a list of files while XP (on a Celeron) is pretty fast. At home it is an ancient Athlon 32-bit box running XP and a slightly less ancient Athlon 64-bit box running Vista (32-bit).

Click Here Click There

Click OK when you’re happy with your selections to return to Photo Gallery. Click the link at the bottom of the window, seen on the right, labeled Remove Properties and Personal Information. You are then shown a new window, seen on the left, which has the option to make a copy of the file with no tags included or just to remove specific tags. Click on File and select Make a Copy to keep a copy of the original picture.

Photo Tagging

Tagging these varieties allows me to easily find and manage whatever I want view or use more quickly. You can further filter down these categories according to the date taken, whether a hibiscus was taken in 2005 or 2006 or if it was in March of 2006 or 2005. Tagging photos is really a fun thing to do, in my opinion. You can tag multiple pictures at a time or simply just one.

Saving Error Message

Seems like people who were using Microsoft Photo Gallery for the longest time without any issues were all of a sudden hit with this “saving error” message. I did find a work around here you could try. Seems silly to have to pay for this though. Even sillier is that Nikon and Microsoft can't seem to get their 64 bit butts together.