Over the past few years, digital cameras have become the photography tool of choice for everyone from novices to professionals. And it's no wonder: Digitals give photographers tremendous freedom to shoot at will without having to worry about paying processing costs or running out of film. If there's a downside to all this photographic freedom, it's that most of us end up with huge numbers of photos cluttering our hard drives. The result has been a thriving market for third-party programs to import, view, and manage all those digital images.

Digital-image management seems like the kind of thing that ought to be part of the operating system. However, although Windows has had programs such as the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, it has never had a program designed to perform the full range of image-management tasks, from importing and viewing to organizing and burning.

Windows Vista changes all that by introducing a new program called Windows Photo Gallery (WPG). This program can import images and videos from a camera, a scanner, removable media, the network, or the Web. You can then view the images, add metadata such as captions and tags, rate the images, search for images, and even apply common fixes to improve the look of photos. You can also burn selected images to a DVD.

You launch the program by selecting Start, All Programs, Windows Photo Gallery. WPG immediately begins gathering the images on your hard disk. You can also import images by hand using the following File menu commands:

• Add Folder to Gallery This command displays the Add Folder to Gallery dialog box, which enables you to import images from a specific folder.

• Import from Scanner or Camera This command launches the Scanner and Camera Wizard, which takes you step by step through the process of importing images from a digital camera, a document scanner, or a removable medium.

Grouping Images

By default, WPG groups the images by folder, but you can change that using the View, Group By command, which enables you to group on a number of metadata properties, including Date Taken, File Size, Image Size, and Camera. You can then select View, Table of Contents to see links that take you to each group.

Image Metadata and Tagging

You can also create your own metadata for each image. WPG enables you to change four properties: Caption, Date Taken, Rating, and Tag. The Tag property enables you to add one or more descriptive keywordstagsto the image, similar to what you do at photo-sharing websites such as Flickr (www.flickr.com). In WPG, you click the image you want to work with, display the Info pane (click Info or Tags, Create a New Tag), click Add Tags, type the tag, and press Enter.

Instant Search

As with so many other Vista windows, WPG comes with an integrated Instant Search box that supports as-you-type searches. After you type text in the Instant Search box, WPG searches filenames and all metadata (including your tags) for matching images and then shows the results in the WPG window.

Image Editing

WPG also comes with a limited set of tools for altering images. Click the image you want to work with and then click Fix. Here you get sliders to adjust the Brightness, Contrast, Color Temperature, and Tint. (You can also click Auto Adjust to have WPG make the adjustments for you.) In all WPG windows, you can also rotate the image.

More Tools

WPG also supports the following features:

• To preview any image, double-click it.
  
  
• To view a slide show, click the Play Slideshow button. Note that the Vista slide show engine comes with 15 different playback modes. During the slide show, move the mouse to display the controls, and then click Themes to choose the playback mode you prefer.
  
  
• To set an image as the desktop background, right-click the image, and then click Set as Background.
  
  
• To burn images to a DVD disc, select Create, DVD.