While reading a fine post the other day on how to use Photo Gallery, I encountered a comment from a Windows Live user saying he had been using the Photos area of Windows Live, but he had no idea about the Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery. This amazes me! We need to get the word out. Anyway, this fortunate soul learned of the existence of Photo Gallery, empowering him to take advantage of all it has to offer.
The basic use of Photo Gallery requires some basic skills you probably already have from using Windows. And there are many fine posts to get you started such as this series you can find here: Windows Live Photo Gallery…..1..Importing your pictures.
This post assumes you already know the basics. In fact, this post takes on a different format from my usual “how-to” type posts. Each tip tries to stand alone, and is presented in a rapid fire “Did you know…” bulleted format.
A popular feature of many programs, alas more so in the past than now, is the tip of the day or the start up tip. Little known facts about the program or its usability come to the surface in a way that didn’t require you to read through a thick manual to get to the “meat” and do interesting things. By design, these tips get right to the point and are not lengthy step by step procedures. I found these tips fantastically useful for the programs that provided them. Sometimes, I would start the program just to read them. Most programs provide a “next tip” button, so I would scan through them all, and before you know it, you’re an expert!
That’s what this post is about. These are some “tips of the day” that Windows Live Photo Gallery might present, if it had such a feature. Since this imaginary friend of a start up screen doesn’t exist, I can stray outside the bounds of purely tipping on Photo Gallery. That’s the beauty of taking liberties with imaginary friends – you can do what you want! But I will restrain myself to things regarding Photo Gallery, photos, and usability.
In these tips, I will refer to different areas of the user interface for Photo Gallery (from here on referred to as WLPG). The central panel shows items. These items will be referred to as “shown items” if they are viewable in the panel but not necessarily selected, and “selected items” for those that are both shown and are selected. A selected item will show a check mark in the Select Check box when the mouse is moved over it and is highlighted. Note that you might not see a shown item if it has scrolled off the central panel, but it is still considered a shown item. Since the documentation doesn’t clearly name these areas, I provide a diagram below for reference:
OK – let’s get started!
Importing and exporting:
- Did you know you have many options naming your photos on import? Set the defaults in File>Options>Import to override your camera’s default names.
- Did you know you can import from cameras, video cameras, online photo albums, photo CD’s and DVD’s?
- Did you know you can name the folder and provide multiple tags when importing your pictures? Set these options when the Import Photos and Videos dialog opens.
- If your camera contains a lot of new pictures taken over a large time span, did you know you can adjust the groupings used to make folders based on a time span? To use this feature, select the option to “Review, organize, and group items to import” on the import wizard. Click next. The next page of this wizard shows you the default groupings of your photos. Move the slider at the bottom to change the default amount of time between groups. The lowest setting is a half hour between groups. The highest setting is “All items in one group.”
- Did you know you can provide unique names for each imported photo group and set multiple tags for each imported group?
- Did you know you can download photos and albums from Windows Live Photos into Photo Gallery? Online photos have a download link. Download albums by clicking More>Download>Download with Photo Gallery.
- Did you know you can download an Windows Live photo album in one zipped file? Download albums as a single Zip file by clicking More>Download>Download as .zip file.
- Did you know that you can publish to other online services beside Windows Live? To use this feature click on Publish in WLPG and select More Services.
- Did you know that WLPG can sync your photos between two computers? Click the Help button in WLPG, the “?” in a blue circle in the upper right corner, and select “Get help with Photo Gallery” then search for “sync”.
- Did you know that, unless you disable this feature, you can upload your tags to your online photo album? Wouldn’t it be nice if Live Search could find them using this metadata?
- Did you know that uploaded photos with tags will download with the tags?
Selecting:
- Did you know you can select all the items in a grouping in the central panel picture area by clicking the group header? Click it again to unselect.
- Did you know that you can select all the shown items by typing cntl-A?
- Did you know that you can select photos and videos by using folders, Date taken, People tags, and descriptive tags on the right hand side of the WLPG? Clicking the little triangles on the left hand side of a choice expands or collapses the choices beneath it.
- Did you know you can select photos taken during a period of time, be it a year, month or day by drilling down into the Date taken selection on the right hand panel?
- Did you know that you can select more than one choice at a time from the right hide side? For example, select a person using the People tags, then while holding the control key down, select a date.
- The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that multiple selections within the same group result in all items from all the choices? For example, select a person by clicking on their People tag. Now select a second person by holding down the control key and clicking their People tag. the result is all items for both people.
- The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that multiple selections from different groups results only in the items belonging to each of the groups? For example, select all photos of a person by selecting its People tag. Now select a year from the Dates taken group by expanding into the Dates taken to find the year, then hold the control key down while selecting the year. The result is all the photos of the person taken in that year.
- The right hand panel has four groups. First is folders, then dates, then People tags, the Descriptive tags. Did you know that you can mix and match selection criteria by selecting multiple items both within the same groups and from multiple groups as well? For example, select a People tag, now holding the control key down select another People tag. The result so far is all items of both people. Now expand the Date taken to find a particular month. Expand the month and select two days within it by holding the control key down and clicking on each date. Now the result is all the photos of both people but only taken on either date.
- Did you know that selecting two people tags results in all items containing either one of the people? If you want items that contain BOTH people then click the People tag for one of them, and type the other person’s name in the filter box. The result is items containing both people.
- Did you know that selecting two Descriptive tags results in all items containing either tag? To find items containing BOTH tags select one of the descriptive tags from the right hand panel then type in the other as a filter in the “Find a photo” box. The result is items containing BOTH descriptive tags. For example, you want vacation pictures of the ocean. Select the “vacation” Descriptive tag and type ocean into the Find box.
- Did you know you can select multiple items found in the central panel by holding the control key down while clicking them? You can select a range by clicking the first one then holding down the shift key to select the last one. You can select individual items by clicking the select check box for the item. You can also make a lasso by clicking and dragging a box around all the items you want.
- Did you know that while there is a menu item under file to “Select all”, there is no menu item to clear the selection or to select the inverse. You can clear the selection by clicking in the central panel on white space. Invert selection requires a lot of thought…
- Did you know you can select items based on their star rating? To use this feature make your selection in the filter area.
- Did you know that you can use tags for temporary purposes? One example of this would be to invert a selection. Another example would be to select all the pictures that do not have people in them. Be creative!
- Did you know that WLPG can remove any unused tags automatically? To do this right click on the “Descriptive tag” header in the left hand panel and select “Tag cleanup”. This can also be done from Options.
- Did you know that you can right click on any descriptive tag and select “Convert to people tag”?
- Did you know you can right click on a People tag and merge it with another contact?
- Did you know that People tags come from your contacts in Windows Live? If you wanted, you could make your pets into people!
- Did you know that your contacts can be grouped into categories, and that those categories are available in WLPG? For example, I could add “Felix”, “Oscar”, “Sylvester”, and “Pity Kitty” as contacts. I could then put them into a “Pet” category.
- Did you know that if you select a category in People tags on the left hand panel that you select everyone in that category? So, if you have a category called “family” then selecting it would show every item that relates to at least one person in your family. If you had a category called “pets” then selecting it would show every item that relates to al least one of your pets. In effect, it results in all your pet photos and videos.
Viewing and Selecting:
- Did you know that you can change the groupings and order of items in the central panel? There are two button in the upper left of this panel for this. One is “Arrange by” and the other is either “Ascending” or “Descending” depending on which is currently set.
- Did you know that you can change a number of groupings related settings by right clicking on a Group Header? Try it by right clicking a group header and selecting Group by>Tag. The results are all the shown items are grouped into individual tag groups – one for each and every tag available for all the shown items. Because items can have multiple tags, some items may fall into more than one tag group.
- Did you know if you right click on any group header, that the “Table of contents” can be selected? This results in a new section on the left hand side of the central panel with quick links to each of the groupings in your shown items. If you’ve grouped by tags, then the table of contents will contain a list of all the tags available for the shown items. Click on a table of contents item (such as a tag) to quickly jump to that grouping. Repeat the process to turn the table of contents off.
- Did you know that the blue highlighted area in the table of contents covers the range of items visible on the screen?
- Did you know that the table of contents indicates the size of each grouping by the size indicator bar?
- Did you know you can resize the shown thumbnails? To do this use the slider bar in the lower right hand corner of WLPG.
- Did you know that all the tags, both People tags and Descriptive tags, that are being used by all the selected items appear on the right hand panel? These tags are clickable. Click one to make a new set of shown items based on that tag. Each clicked tag changes the shown items and, all the tags for the remaining selected items appear, and the original items remain selected. You can do clever things with this.
- Did you know that the header for each grouping shows the number of items shown in the group as well as the number of items selected?
- Did you know the status bar (at the bottom of the WLPG application window) indicates the total number of items shown as well as the total number selected? Note that these may not be visible because they’ve scrolled off the central panel.
- Did you know that the Information section of the right hand panel shows information about the selected items. It shows the information about the last selected item. You can also change information here that’ll apply to all the selected items. For example, clicking on four stars will make all the selected items four star items.
- Did you know that you can identify people in a selection? Select the photos in interest, and all the people in them will show in the People tags area on the right hand side. If the “People found” link appears here then you can click it. The viewer will open on that photo with a box around the unidentified face it found. Identify it and any others, but do not close the viewer. Instead, click the next button in the lower right hand side of the viewer, and the next photo with a face found with appear. Repeat until there are no more.
Photos
- Did you know you can make panoramas with WLPG? Don’t think one dimensionally! Many people make these by sweeping across the horizon and stitching them together. But they can be stacked too. Try making one that is three photos wide by two photos high. The stitching algorithm is so smart that it even gets it right for off kilter, angled photos! try it – it either will work or it won’t!
- Did you know that panoramic photos can be odd shapes? Use the built in cropping tool to make them rectangular again.
- Did you know that panoramic photos can be odd shapes? If you upload them to an online album, use one of the resizing options to make sure the online thumbnail appears. If you don’t, then you may end up with an plain icon instead of a representation of your photo.
- Did you know that Microsoft Research provides a free Image Composite Editor? Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. It adds itself to the Extras menu when you install it.
- Did you know that you can right click on an item(s) and change some of the properties? By right clicking you can change names, times, size etc.
- Did you know that you can right click on an item to get its file properties? The Details tab has a wealth of information.
Batch Operations:
- Did you know that you can rename all the photos you have selected in one step? To do this select the photos you want renamed, and the order you want them. Then either right click a selected item and chose rename, or just go to the information section in the right hand panel, and enter a new name. All the photos will have this same name as a prefix and an index number inside parenthesis to distinguish them. For example, you may have some vacation pictures in a folder. Each are name something like IMG_XXX where XXX is a number. Select all of these, then right click, select rename, type the new name in the information area, and the pictures will be renamed like Vacation (1), Vacation (2) … (Note: You can also do this for any files in the Windows XP, Vista, and 7 operating systems. Do the same steps in File Explorer.)
- Did you know that you can give all the selected photos the same caption? This may be useful to you for uploaded photo albums or if you want all the photos to have some part of the caption same – such as a the location. To do this select your items. The type the caption in the Caption area on the right hand panel. Later you can edit each item by adding something to the caption without removing what was already there.
- Did you know you can batch change other metadata for the selected items? To do this, select your items, then type in the Information section in the lower part of the right hand panel the metadata you want to change, either the caption, name, date, time, stars, or author. This is then applied to all selected items. If you have Windows Vista or later, you can also change metadata at the operating system level.
Searching for Photos:
- Did you know the Find box at the top right of the central panel is not as full featured as the search box in Vista? You can type criteria here, but it appears to be “AND”ed together. It doesn’t like you to use (Boolean) terms like “AND” or “OR” in the box. Using this box in conjunction with the selections on the right hand panel can yield results that most need.
- Did you know that Descriptive tags are available in Vista and Windows 7? (Possibly XP too??) Whatever descriptive tags you put on items in WLPG are available at the operating system level. They are a part of the file itself.
- Did you know that (it appears that) People tags are NOT available at the operating system level. To get around this you can use WLPG to select persons of interest using their People tag, making sure to select every item of theirs and assign a descriptive tag to represent them. This tag will now be available at the operating system level.
- Did you know that you can do advanced searches to find items at the operating system level that you cannot do from within WLPG? For example, you can select all the photos using a tag, say “X” and exclude all the photos that also have a different tag, say “Y”. To do this within WLPG you can use temporary tags to implement complex set logic. You must be a mathematician or a magician to accomplish this. You’ll need to understand how to both add and remove descriptive tags for set logic operations.
The WLPG application
- Did you know the right hand panel us really two panels? You can adjust the size of each by moving the dividing line up and down between the”Caption” and “Information”.
- Did you know that the three panels, the left hand panel, the central panel, and the right hand panel can be resized by moving the dividers between them?
- Did you know that you can right click on an a single selected item and select “Open file location” to gain access to the item at the operating system level via File Explorer?
- Did you know that the Help system can answer many of your questions? You should consult it first if you need help.
Other Applications – Helper applications
- Did you know that WLPG, while a great tool, doesn’t have all the functions and features you may need? If you have another photo editing program installed, it may appear in the “Extras” menu in WLPG. If it does, then you can select up to 15 different items, click Extras>Open with and then the program you want to use. The application will open all your selected items. If your application doesn’t appear then you can manually associate it with image or video file types by right clicking an image file in File Explorer and selecting “Open With” and then “Choose Default Program…” Find the application you want to use and add it. You may wish to uncheck the “Always use the selected program to open this type of file” checkbox – otherwise you’ll be changing how you open these files rather than just adding an option to open with this application.
- Did you know there are free applications available to help you edit your photos? These can be made available via the Extras menu, and provide you with advanced editing features such as layers, dodging and burning, and color control. Try these: http://www.getpaint.net/ and http://www.gimp.org/ (in order of ease of use).
- Did you know that WLPG doesn’t do geotagging? However, Microsoft Research provides a free tool that allows you to add the geotagging metadata. Look here for this: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2
- Did you know that WLPG doesn’t do the Ken Burns Effect? However, Microsoft kindly provides a free tool that does. You may have heard of it. It’s called Photo Story 3 and it works on XP and Vista. I haven’t checked if it’ll work on Windows 7, but I hope it does. It’s a wonderful little program that allows you to make sound synced / music / narrated videos out of your photos using the Ken Burns effect. You can read more about this (and how Apple thinks they invented it!) on Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows:
How typical!
OK – so this was a little different. I think I got a lot more information out in under 4000 words. And half of those are “Did you know!” It doesn’t have all the pictures, and specific instructions, but I find that often times, it’s not the “how” that gets you there, but the “what.” For many people, they will see these tips, and go “oh – I didn’t know you could right click there!” And once the realization comes into play, you really won’t need a visual guide, if you can already get around in the program. That’s what I’m going for here. I hope it works.
So, please correct me if I got anything wrong, and please, I would love it, if you have more tips I can add to the list. Please post them in the comments! I know I’ve skipped entire areas such as printing. Let me know if anything is unclear. I’ll try to rephrase it.
Ultimately, I would like it if Windows Live Essentials added a “Tip of the day” start up type screen. But maybe I’m being nostalgic. In any event, I hope you enjoy these, and they help you be more productive.
-Jeff
