Windows Photo Gallery

Windows Photo Gallery will automatically display the contents of your Pictures folder. You have various viewing options including various thumbnail sizes as well as a slideshow facility. You can choose to add other folders to Windows Photo Gallery also. You can also add single pictures to the photo gallery from any location on your hard drives.

Above, you can see the default interface for Windows Photo Gallery. The right pane has the various options for browsing the files, you can choose to view view and pictures or just pictures. You can also make your selection based on tags and ratings or other information such as the date taken or from which folders they are located. You also have a summary at the end of the pane with the amount of items in the photo gallery with the number of items you have selected,

When you doubleclick a picture, you are able to view the picture within the photo gallery with some information on the right, as well as the ability to add tags to each picture individually and to remove the tags, which can be done by right clicking on them, e.g. if you right click on Landscape, you can select the remove tag feature for that particular tag. You can see some controls below the picture also, this is to browse through the pictures in the folder that you are browsing. There are several controls; a magnification tool, a button to view the picture as its actual size, a left arrow to view the previous picture a slideshow button to start the slideshow, a right arrow to view the next photo. There are also buttons to rotate counterclockwise and clockwise as well as to delete the picture.

When you browse the photo gallery you have various options to view the pictures or videos as well. You can select the viewing options from the icon shown above with options below such as thumbnails, tiles, group and sorting options and as a table of contents. You also will find a search bar next to this button which you can use to search for specific pictures if you are unable to find by browsing, this can be expecially useful if you have hundereds of photos.

As you can see above, as you move your mouse over the various pictures in the photo gallery, a larger thumbnail hovers above with more information, so you can quickly browse through a large amount of photos and view them as larger thumbnails.

When you view the properties of a file, such as a picture through windows explorer, you can see that there are various tags associated with the file that can be added or removed, however if you are transfering these files to other computers or for public download, you may wish to remove all the tags or just some of them. 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.