Windows Photo Gallery
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Windows Photo Gallery | |
Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista |
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Developer: | Microsoft |
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Latest release: | 6.0.6000.16386 / November 8, 2006 |
OS: | Microsoft Windows |
Use: | Photo editing software |
License: | MS-EULA |
Website: | Windows Vista: Features Explained: Photo Gallery |
Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) is a photo management, tagging, and editing tool that is included with Windows Vista.
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[edit] Features
Windows 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. 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.
WPG also has limited support for tagging and managing video files, though not editing them. It also integrates with Windows DVD Maker to provide integrated DVD burning features.
WPG can also be used to acquire photos and videos from digital cameras, scanners, and other sources.
According to the official Windows Vista Product Guide, Windows Photo Gallery is available in all editions of Windows Vista; however, themed photo slideshows are only available in the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista.
[edit] RAW support
Windows Photo Gallery also includes support for RAW images. Windows Vista introduced a standard codec format which camera vendors can use to provide a conversion between their proprietary RAW formats and a standard format used in the operating system.[1] Windows Photo Gallery detects when a codec is needed, and provides a link to the relevant download location for the codec. The touch-up capabilities are disabled for RAW images.
As of February 2007, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus have released codecs.[2]
[edit] Tagging
Photo Gallery has the concept of hierarchical tagging (e.g. People/Jim, Places/Paris). This has the unfortunate side-effect of the tags in the photos actually appearing in this manner. It is debatable whether the additional information that Paris is a place is really required. It does not have the ability to group tags in the same manner as the Photoshop software.
Windows Photo Gallery has support for Adobe's new XMP metadata standard, a descendent of the ubiquitous Exif standard which almost all digital cameras currently support. This allows for data such as the tags to be stored and edited much more efficiently than Exif. However, edits to XMP data on JPEGs will not be visible on photos if they are transferred to an XP-based system (Date tags, for example, will revert to their original Exif information even if XMP-related changes have been made).
Deleting a tag from Photo Gallery will also remove it from all photos in the Gallery.