Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

The Digital Shoebox

If you’ve imported your photos into Photo Gallery, you now see a neatly arranged grid of thumbnails in the main photo-viewing area. This is, presumably, your entire photo collection, including every last picture you’ve ever imported—the digital equivalent of that old shoebox you’ve had stuffed in the closet for the past 10 years.

Your journey out of chaos has begun. From here, you can sort your photos, give them titles, group them into smaller subcollections (called albums), and tag them with keywords so you can find them quickly.

The Bigger Picture

If you point to a photo thumbnail without clicking, Photo Gallery is kind enough to display, at your cursor tip, a larger version of it. Think of it as a digital version of the magnifying loupe that art experts use to inspect gemstones and paintings.

Tip

If this feature gets on your nerves, choose File→Options, and then turn off “Show photo and video previews in tooltips.”

You can also make all the thumbnails in Photo Gallery grow or shrink using the Size slider—the horizontal slider at the lower-right corner of the window. Drag the slider all the way left, and you get micro-thumbnails so small that you can fit 200 or more of them in the window. If you drag it all the way to the right, you end up with such large thumbnails that only a few fit on the screen at a time.

For the biggest view of all, though, double-click a thumbnail. It opens all the way, filling the window. At this point, you can edit the picture, too, as described ...