Windows® 7 All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter IV.4. Managing Pics with Windows Live Photo Gallery

In This Chapter

• Organizing with the Photo Gallery

• Fixing photos

• Taking advantage of Photo Gallery quirks

• Tagging with verve and alacrity

Remember that photo I took of Dad falling out of the fishing boat? You know, the one from 1998? Or was it 1996? Wait a sec. Gimme a minute. I have it right here. Uh, no, it must be over here. Hmmm, maybe it's in this folder down here. Is it on the network drive? Er, where in the %$#@! did I put that thing?

Windows Live Photo Gallery brings a handful of sophisticated tools to the thorny problems of gathering, fixing, and, most of all, finding pictures on your computer.

Unfortunately, WLPG (as it's known to its friends) can't read your mind. If you want to retrieve that shot of Dad falling out of the fishing boat, you need to tag (mark) the picture with some pertinent keywords that you can later find. I don't know about you, but it'd take me a year or two to go through all my old shots and sort them out. By the time I was done, I'd have to start all over again with new shots. Like the hare and the tortoise, I'd probably never finish.

That's the fundamental problem with the fancy WLPG indexing methods. Windows Live Photo Gallery can't create indexes out of thin air. You have to do the work before you can reap the rewards — and it's debatable whether all the time you might invest in cataloging your pictures will ever pay off.

You have to put the garbage in before you can take it out, eh?

Note

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