Windows Photo Gallery - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Windows Photo Gallery is a photo management

Image organizer

An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organizing digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications.- Common image organizers features :...

, tagging, and editing tool developed by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, and is included with all editions of Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

. Themed photo slideshows with smooth transitions are only available in the Home Premium and Ultimate editions.

Windows Photo Gallery is not based on Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

Windows Photo Viewer is an image viewer developed by Microsoft that is included with Windows 7. It was also included with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 under the name of Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. It was temporarily replaced with Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista, but has been...

but is a completely rewritten program based on the PIX engine which uses the Windows Imaging Component

Windows Imaging Component

The Windows Imaging Component is a Component Object Model based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 3 for working with and processing digital images and image metadata...

(WIC) library instead of GDI+. The underlying graphics engine pipeline has been overhauled with support for large and high bit depth

Color depth

In computer graphics, color depth or bit depth is the number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer. This concept is also known as bits per pixel , particularly when specified along with the number of bits used...

HDR

High dynamic range imaging

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods...

images. Windows Photo Gallery has native metadata handling and tagging support and since the Windows Imaging Component is extensible, it can organize and view any image format for which a third party WIC codec is installed. By default, it can view JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and HD Photo images, as well as video. RAW image formats used by high-end professional cameras are also supported by installing their respective WIC codecs

Windows Imaging Component

. Basic photo editing such as adjusting exposure

Exposure (photography)

In photography, exposure is the total amount of light allowed to fall on the photographic medium during the process of taking a photograph. Exposure is measured in lux seconds, and can be computed from exposure value and scene luminance over a specified area.In photographic jargon, an exposure...

, color, red eye

Red-eye effect

The red-eye effect in photography is the common appearance of red pupils in color photographs of eyes. It occurs when using a photographic flash very close to the camera lens , in ambient low light. The effect appears in the eyes of humans and animals that have no tapetum lucidum, hence no...

and cropping

Cropping (image)

Cropping refers to the removal of the outer parts of an image to improve framing, accentuate subject matter or change aspect ratio. Depending on the application, this may be performed on a physical photograph, artwork or film footage, or achieved digitally using image editing software...

can be done right within the application. Windows Photo Gallery also supports ICC V4 embedded color profiles and has Windows Color System

Windows Color System

Windows Color System is a platform for color management first included with Windows Vista that aims to achieve color consistency across various software and hardware, including cameras, monitors, printers and scanners. Different devices interpret the same colors differently, according to their...

support. However, legacy image formats such as WMF and EMF do not have their respective codecs available in WIC, and therefore cannot be viewed by default. Windows Photo Gallery can also view GIF images, but it shows animated GIFs as individual frames instead of a continuous animation; animated GIFs play properly in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

.

In Windows 7, the editing capabilities of Windows Photo Gallery have been removed and as such the program is called Windows Photo Viewer. The full capabilities including editing and themed slideshows can be obtained by installing Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a photo management and photo sharing application released as a part of Microsoft's Windows Live initiative. It is an upgraded version of Windows Photo Gallery, which is a part of Windows Vista....

.

An upgraded version of Photo Gallery released under the Windows Live

Windows Live

Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, part of their software plus services platform. A majority of these services are Web applications, accessible from a browser, but there are also client-side binary applications that require...

brand known as Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery

, can be installed using the Windows Live Installer, includes new features such as the viewing color histogram

Color histogram

In image processing and photography, a color histogram is a representation of the distribution of colors in an image. For digital images, a color histogram represents the number of pixels that have colors in each of a fixed list of color ranges, that span the image's color space, the set of all...

of an image, panoramic

Panoramic photography

Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio...

stitching

Image stitching

Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image. Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most approaches to image stitching require nearly exact...

and auto-tagging during importing and the ability to share photos by uploading them to Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces was Microsoft's blogging and social networking platform. The site was originally released in early 2004 as MSN Spaces to compete with other social networking sites, and re-launched in 2006 as a part of a shifting of community services away from the MSN brand...

or Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

Features

Windows Photo Gallery provides the ability to organize digital photo collection in its Gallery view, by adding titles, rating, captions, and custom metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

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

Image editing

Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known as photo retouching, using tools such as an airbrush to modify photographs, or editing illustrations with any...

functions, such as resizing, cropping, red-eye reduction etc., and also allows printing photos, via the Photo Printing Wizard.

There is limited support for tagging and managing video files, though not editing them. It integrates with Windows DVD Maker

Windows DVD Maker

Windows DVD Maker is an application included in premium editions of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 Home Premium and above editions that is designed to enable the creation of DVD movies that can be played using DVD playback software or on a standalone consumer DVD player...

to provide integrated DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

burning features. Windows Photo Gallery can also be used to acquire photos and videos from digital cameras, scanners, and other sources.

Format support

Windows Photo Gallery uses the Windows Imaging Component

Windows Imaging Component

framework, that can be used by any codec to integrate with the image handling capabilities of the operating system and other applications that use WIC

Windows Imaging Component

. Windows Vista ships with codecs for common formats like BMP, JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, PNG, TIFF and HD Photo. However, GIF

GIF

The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....

images do not appear in the gallery.

By means of Windows Imaging Component

Windows Imaging Component

which is included in Windows Vista and also available for Windows XP, developers can provide support for any image format at the operating system level. Some camera vendors have developed WIC codecs for their proprietary RAW image formats. Windows Photo Gallery detects when a codec is needed, and provides a link to the relevant download location for the codec. If the appropriate codecs are installed, RAW images

RAW image format

A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image scanner, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor...

can be viewed by double-clicking them. However, Windows Photo Gallery does not automatically associate with RAW or other image file extensions for which codecs have been installed. Also, the touch-up capabilities are disabled for RAW images. As of November 2007, Canon, Nikon

Nikon

, also known as just Nikon, is a multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging. Its products include cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments, and the steppers used in the photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication, of which...

, Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

, Olympus

Olympus Corporation

is a Japan-based manufacturer of optics and reprography products. Olympus was established on 12 October 1919, initially specializing in microscope and thermometer businesses. Its global headquarters are in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, while its USA operations are based in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,...

and Pentax

Pentax

Pentax is a brand name used by Hoya Corporation for its medical-related products & services and Pentax Ricoh Imaging Company for cameras, sport optics , etc. Hoya purchased and merged with the Japanese optics company on March 31, 2008. Hoya's Pentax imaging business was sold to Ricoh Company, Ltd...

have released WIC codecs. A commercial DNG

Digital Negative (file format)

Digital Negative is an open raw image format owned by Adobe used for digital photography. It was launched on September 27, 2004. The launch was accompanied by the first version of the DNG specification, plus various products including a free of charge DNG Converter utility...

codec is also available from Ardfry Imaging.

Tagging

Windows Photo Gallery uses the concept of hierarchical tagging

Tag (metadata)

In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...

(e.g. People/Jim, Places/Paris). It does not have the ability to group tags in the same manner as Photoshop software. Deleting a tag from Windows Photo Gallery will also remove it from all photos in the utility.

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

's Extensible Metadata Platform

Extensible Metadata Platform

The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a standard, created by Adobe Systems Inc., for processing and storing standardized and proprietary information relating to the contents of a file....

(XMP) metadata standard, a descendent of the ubiquitous Exif

Exchangeable image file format

Exchangeable image file format is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras , scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras...

standard which almost all digital cameras currently support, is also supported. This allows for data such as the tags to be stored and edited much more efficiently than Exif or IPTC. However, edits to XMP data on JPEG images will not be visible on photos if they are transferred to a Windows XP-based system. Date tags, for example, will revert to their original Exif information even if XMP-related changes have been made.

Bugs

After rotating the image Windows Photo Gallery does not change the EXIF camera orientation flag.

Features

Format support

Tagging

Bugs

See also