Windows Photo Gallery 2012

Windows Live Photo Gallery's name has become less of a mouthful, now that Microsoft has ditched the "Live" branding. Aside from the name change, Windows Photo Gallery adds a new collage feature and the ability to upload slideshows directly to the Vimeo video sharing site. These join the program's several standout features, such as panorama joining, photo fuse, face recognition, and all the basic photo fixes you'd expect?crop, straighten, retouch, red-eye, along with exposure, noise, and color correction. All of this comes in a very clear, usable interface that makes it easy to share your work. It remains a full-fledged consumer photo editing tool/organizer on a par with the Apple's iPhoto ($15 Direct, 4 stars), Google's Picasa (Free, 4 stars), or ACDSee ($50, 3 stars).

But Photo Gallery still lacks a couple things you'll get in those competitors, including built in maps to show photo geo-location and the ability to edit camera raw files. I also had trouble using it with Apple iCloud's Photo Stream, and the app isn't aware of the EXIF orientation info, so photos display upside down. And like a lot of Microsoft software these days, Photo Gallery only runs in Windows 7 or Windows 8. But luckily, XP and Vista users can still download earlier versions of the program that run on their systems (from the Microsoft's Windows Essentials 2012 help page).

Interface
Windows Photo Gallery feels like a full-blown image editing application, yet manages to maintain its ease of use for general consumers. The main window is adorned with an Office-like ribbon toolbar across the top; and the new Find tab lets you filter by keyword, rating, date, face, and more. Below the ribbon is a three-panel interface, showing your folders on the left, the images in the middle, and actions like tagging and editing in a right pane.

As in more advanced photo apps like Lightroom, double-clicking an image in Windows Photo Gallery brings it up, and doing so again returns you to gallery view. At the bottom right, there are rotate image arrows, next and previous buttons, and a zoom slider that lets you size both thumbnails and single image view to whatever zoom level you want (the mouse wheel can also be used for zooming). Holding the left mouse button lets you pan around the photo, which I found to be a very fluid way of navigating images.

I do wish the left panel offered a Last Import option the way iPhoto does. The Find tab, however, can fill this role; it lets you limit the gallery view by date, month, or year taken, as well as by the people in the pictures, star ratings, and flagged status. You can also click the binocular icon to search within those results. If the default interface doesn't suit you, you can customize it by adding or subtracting options from a quick access toolbar located either below the ribbon or up in the window border to save viewing space.

Photo Importing
The import experience is just what you'd want. As you import, you can group photos by date and time, add tags, add the date to filenames, and now set a base file name. Raw camera files are supported, but only if you've installed your camera manufacturer's codec in Windows. Fortunately, gallery tells you if you need to do this, and it even takes you to the camera manufacturer's download site. As with most photo editors these days, any edits you make don't affect the original imported image, but rather a copy is saved with the edits.

I found working with large raw files slower in Windows Photo Gallery than in pro-level apps like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299 Street, ), and unlike iPhoto and Picasa image adjustments didn't work with raw images. As I mentioned above, iCloud Photo Stream images shot with an iPhone 4S presented problems for me: I wasn't able to save changes, and the photos displayed upside down.

Photo Editing
All the expected photo adjustments are on offer: cropping, red-eye fixing, straightening, exposure, color correction, and even noise reduction. Buttons let you apply fixes automatically, but a "Fine tune" button offers deeper control (such as an adjustable histogram, highlights, shadows, sharpness, and color temperature). This version adds a new tool: Blemish removal, which worked excellently in my testing, as did the red-eye fix.

An Auto-adjust option lets you configure what you want fixed?any combination of exposure, color, NR, and straightening. It did a mostly good job on my test images, never drastically exaggerating brightness or other factors, as some editors occasionally do. The editing is non-destructive, so, at any point, you can revert to the original. A new batch edit lets you apply fixes to a bunch of selected images at once, but it only works with the auto-fixes?color, exposure, straightening, and noise reduction?not with the fine-tuning.

Face Tagging and Geo-Tagging
Face recognition takes an important role in Photo Gallery. The ribbon bar has a prominent People tag button, and your friends' faces stare up at you from the bar's Quick find area, offering to show all photos featuring them. You get a dropdown showing your contacts (any of which you can assign to the face) when you select an image and choose "Tag as." The face-recognition software becomes increasingly accurate as you identify more people's faces. A "Batch people tag" option opens its own tab and proposes faces of folks you've already tagged. A simple Confirm or Ignore button completes the action, and if there are more pictures the program thinks are of that person, it will keep displaying them till there aren't any more. It's very similar to the way Picasa's face recognition works.

Geotagging works with cameras' built in GPS (such as the iPhone's), or you can manually enter locations. You can sort all geo-tagged photos grouped by location. You can right-click on a geo-tag to see the location in Bing after the browser launches, but there are no maps inside the app, as there are in Picasa and iPhoto. Of course, if you upload geo-tagged photos to Flickr, you can see them placed on a map online.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/G-ubwft1f50/0,2817,2370417,00.asp

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