Photo Gallery

[Ed Dixon]

Since this is referenced a lot, I decided to take a quick look tonight.
Maybe I'm missing something, but here are my initial reactions:

Open is missing. If you have a photo on your hard drive or network, I can't
find a way to open it to look at it. It's probably there, but well hidden.
Could not get any network functions to work.

Add Folders to Gallery. So then you copy the pic files over the network and
place in a folder on the Vista hard drive. I then try to use the Add
Folders to Gallery options. It shows me all my hard drives, but seems to be
unable to find any folders anywhere. They are all missing in action.
Giving up on using this, I type in the folder name and it adds that folder
to the Gallery. So now the folder is there, but none of the pics I copied
there appear at all. They are also missing in action.

My camera is a Nikon, so perhaps MS forgot to build in the ablity to see raw
Nikon images (many freeware programs have no troubles at all). Once I
convert to jpg, the images at least come up. The basic edit controls are
about what is included in the lite versionf of Microsoft Picture It. That's
a pretty fair package that has been around for at least 5 years.

Thus far there are scads of freeware programs that do all these things
better. Since I already have an assortment of other programs (Nikon Edit,
Adobe xxx, etc), there is nothing here that looks interesting.

Perhaps for someone who has nothing, but even the programs that come with
$75 digital cameras are in the same ballpark.

Ed

 

[Andre Da Costa [Extended64]]

All my pictures in the Pictures folder show up in the Photo Gallery. If you
have them on certain places on the hard disk, such as the root of the drive,
they probably will no show up, since certain aspects of the root of the
drive are not indexed and there are missions on it. Try puting your photos
in your user folder.

Also, there is a dedicated Vista newsgroup for issues concerning pictures -
lets try utilizing them microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video
--
--
Andre
Windows Connected | http://www.windowsconnected.com
Extended64 | http://www.extended64.com
Blog | http://www.extended64.com/blogs/andre
http://spaces.msn.com/members/adacosta

 

[Ed Dixon]

All my pics are all in standard organized windows folders. Every picture
tool I have ever tried has no problem at all. However The Vista product
does not seem to be able to find much of anything.

What I see thusfar in Photo Gallery is second rate compared to most freeware
products. Again, maybe I've missed the gems there, but they seem to be
hiding from me.

Ed

 

[Puppy Breath]

I don't have a lot of time into it either, partly because I can see right
off the bat that some things aren't working yet. But my experience with what
I have done is different. For example, there's an Open button on the
toolbar, and you can also right-click any thumbnail and choose Open With.
Fix takes you to a simple editor for cropping, brightness, contrast, red
eye.



Had no problem adding folders from local drives. But the Network option
isn't working for me.



Tags seem to be working OK. Click Not Tagged in the left column, then you
can add tag words (like keywords) to any picture or group of selected
pictures. Later you can view all the pictures that contain any given tag
word just by clicking that tag word in the left column. I'd that that's the
main point of the gallery. To be able to assign tag words to all types of
pix and videos, independent of the file type and the metatags that each file
type offers.

 

[Ed Dixon]

The Open button on the toolbar appears to be to select programs to use, not
to select an individual photo to be displayed/edited. The File menu is
where I would expect an Open command to be, and none appears there.

The right click on thumbnail works fine, as long as the image is already
there. However someone has placed an image in directory xyz on the PC. You
want to look at it. You don't want to include that folder as it is used for
other things. How?

Fix seems to work fine and is on par with simialar features includes in
early versions MS Picture It. Essentially the basic photo edit options.

When I use the Add Folders option, only a subsset of the actual folders are
displayed. Most are either hidden or missed. When a tools gives me the
option to select a folder, I expect to see every single folder, not the ones
it chooses. If for some reason I don't have access, I expect an Access
Denied message.

Ed

 

[Puppy Breath]

We might be using different builds, I don't know. I don't have a menu bar at
all in Photo Gallery. If you just want to preview a pica, not open it in a
specific program, you double-click its icon.

When I browse for folders the tree is, of course, collapsed. But I can get
to any folder just be expanding the parent. It would be a bit extreme to
have every single folder displayed when you first get to that tree.

You're probably right about not being able to add a single photo to the
gallery. But you could still add that folder. Only the pix and videos from
that folder will be in the gallery.

I think everyone here already knows there are a zillion programs on the
market that can do anything you can do in Vista. It's not really a question
of which product is better as Vista is an OS, not a specific product. It's
more a question of whether or not having certain capabilities built into the
OS is advantageous to the type of work you do and how you do it.

And it's not a question of whether it works with old hardware. It's a
question of how well it utilizes current and future hardware (with an
emphasis on "future"). That's why I was asking how many people would
build/buy a new PC just to run Vista in an earler post. Interesting to see
the different reactions to that question.

 

[Ed Dixon]

We probably have different builds.

I think having basic photo and music things in the OS is a good thing. They
are basic and are included. However they work poorly in the build I have.
We'll see how it works in later builds.

When I mentioned all folders, I meant in a tree view sense. You select
folder A and it expands into A1, A2 and A3. If you then select A2, you can
expand it to show any included folders. What happened here is that A may
show, but A1, A2 and A3 does not show un expansion, even though they exist
in the file system.

The lack of ability to load a single photo is a big weakness. Virtually
every photo tool ever created can do this, for a good reason.

Ed

 

[Puppy Breath]

I guess that last part is the part I don't get. The idea behind the Photo
Gallery is to have a central store for all your photos and videos.What would
be the purpose of excluding specific items from a tool that's designed to
make it easy to organize and access them all?

 

[Ed Dixon]

I understand the concept, I just think it's the wrong one. Having photo
management options is a good thing, but not at the expense of the ability of
the user to control the management.

I take 10-15 thousand photos a year. I have a management approach that
works just fine and have zero interest in letting some other tool decide how
to deal with 50GB of personal images.

As I said before in another similar post. beauty is in the eyes of the
beholder. The trick is not to remove some of the views of beauty through
poor software design.

Ed

 

[Puppy Breath]

Yes, it's all about perception. No argument there.

 

[Guest]

You say you were able to add photo folders from other local drives to your
photo gallery. I am completely unable to do this and wonder whether your
folders are on the Vista drive or another logical drive. I have all my
photos on a separate data drive, and when I click to add them to the photo
gallery, they are not added; same with video. I have reported this as a
bug, but wonder if there is something else going on. I've noticed a few
others that report this problem. Is is common? I think I could put them in
my Vista Users folder and they would show up, but I don't like mingling my
data with my operating system.

 

[R.U. Zerious]

I'm not the one who said that the first time. But I tried it when I saw your
post and had no problem adding a bunch of photo from an external hard drive
to Photo Gallery. You didn't mention what happens when you try it. Do you
get a message? Are you sure you're looking in the right place after adding
the folder? Try clicking the Untagged category. Chances are they've never
been tagged so they should all how up in there.

Not mingling your data with your OS. Interesting concept that one. Not even
on the same drive, eh?

 

[Guest]

When I try to add a folder or a picture, absolutely nothing happens. There
is no error message but the folder or picture never is available. I have
looked under ALL the various places, untagged, tagged, all pictures, etc.
When I copy one of my picture folders over to my User folder on my Vista
drive, it does appear in Photo Gallery, but from that location they appear
automatically, I think. The application says in its help file that it can
add folders from anywhere and gives directions for how to do that. That is
what I try to do. When I tried to add a picture, I could see the picture
with the little + sign, and a message "copy to" but nothing was copied. I
believe others have mentioned this problem, as well.

 

[Guest]

An Update: I don't know what was preventing the pictures from being added,
but it must have been something in regards to the My Pictures folder from my
XP install. I noticed when I moved the various picture folders to the root
of a different drive, I was able to add them. (First moved entire My
Pictures directory to the new drive and it still didn't work.) Then I
thought the folders couldn't be nested and that was the problem; but then I
tried nesting a few and noticed the sub-folders were brought into the
Gallery, too. Finally got all my photos added. Then put a NEW Pictures
folder on the drive and moved all the sub-folders to it, as I didn't want all
the pictures to be in the root of the drive. Lo and behold, they all were
able to be imported into the Gallery.

I'm learning a lot about Vista, but hope it isn't this hard to upgrade when
the final version comes out.