Organizing Photos is the main purpose of this tool so Microsoft has put some definite focus on this capability. You can show images by tag (which are easy to create and assign) but the best way to navigate photos is by Date Taken. A hierarchal treeview of dates displayed by Year, then Month, then day makes browsing a large number of photos very easy. One of the metadata types you can assign to photos (and other media) is a star rating from one to five and naturally this is another way you can easily view certain photos.

Unlike iTunes, Windows does not manage your image file locations but instead just collects them into one view no matter where they are stored. Therefore, another way to view certain photos is by choosing the file system folder where the image is stored. The Folders node at the bottom of the list includes sub-nodes that represent each of the folders where images have been located.

The menu at the top of the screen offers access to several things you can do with a selected image no matter what view you are in.

Click Fix to gain access to an “Auto Adjust” option and controls such as “Adjust Explosure”, “Adjust Color”, “Crop Picture” and “Fix Red Eye”. There is an “Undo” button on the bottom that will continue to undo any changes you’ve made until you are back to your original photo (and a redo button to undo your undos). There is no explicit save option, but when you are done with any changes and go back to the gallery (or move to another page with the navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen) the picture automatically saves. Hey! I didn’t mean to save that! No worries: open the picture back up with a double click and you’ll find a “revert” button which will make use of Vista’s built in shadow copy feature to roll back to the previous version of the file.

Click print and you ‘ll see that (as in Windows XP) you may print various standard photo sizes, As you’d expect the Vista way of doing things looks better and is more intuitive-- the interface is improved from a wizard to a single window layout that lets you make all your decisions regarding how you want to print at once.

Click email and before attaching it to an email, you are prompted for what size image you’d like to send: Smaller (640x480), Small (800x600), Medium (1024x768, and medium is the default by the way), Large (1280x1024) or “Original Size”. As you make a choice from the drop-down menu, the total estimated size is adjusted so you know how big a pile of attachments you are looking at. This is very handy for those of us with 10 mega pixel cameras that want to send pictures off to family without the hassle of resizing them beforehand.

If you choose Burn, you’ll be prompted to insert a blank disk in order to create a data disk. You can choose Make a Move to fire up Windows Movie Maker and finally there is an Open option that lets you choose from a list of programs associated with the image file type.

Finally, the File menu contains an item to open you screensaver settings where you will find one screensaver in the list called “Photos” which is lets you specify an individual folder of images for a screensaver photo slideshow. It would be nice if this were more integrated with the Photo Gallery, but I’m happy with the many enhancements provided right in Vista (and content to know there is always room for them to make it even better in the future).