Andrews Family

It’s been a while but I’ll try to finish up my series of reviews on Windows Vista. Here’s a look at it’s new features for pictures and video.

Pictures:

Vista includes Windows Photo Gallery which is for photo organizing and editing. The first feature that I noticed is that it has a picture importer which pops up when you plug in your camera or insert your memory card. I liked it and it had more options than most usually do such as options of how to name the folders. Once you have your photos on the computer the organizer makes it easy to find what you are looking for by showing you thumbnails sorted by date. You can also add tags and ratings to the photos. Actually the importer gives you the option to add tags when they are imported which makes it easy to import and tag you pictures from an event. Once you’ve found the picture you are looking for you can click the "Fix" button to go to a simple editor to do things like remove red eye, crop, and make adjustments. It will even do automatic adjustments if you want which are pretty good for most situations. Overall it is a lot like Google’s Picasa. I’d also say it has some of the same limitations as Picasa. For example both only allow one level of tags so you can’t have sub-tags like Website->November, and it isn’t easy to add a tag to multiple pictures at once. So power users will probably prefer with something like Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Video: 

Vista includes everything you need to create and burn movies to DVDs, assuming you have a DVD burner. Yes, your Vista PC will not only be able to burn but also play DVDs with no additional software which was required in XP. Vista has an updated version of Windows Movie Maker which makes it easy for you to edit your video. It’s easy to use and lets you deal with video, audio, and still pictures all together. After you’ve made your movie and you want to burn it to a DVD, simply fire up Windows DVD Maker. That will walk you through adding your videos and making your DVD menus and chapters. It had an impressive number of templates. When you are done just burn away. I was pretty impressed with what was built in and it will be more than sufficient for most home users. If you are a power user and want more options you still have the option to pay for third party software.

These new features of Vista were included with the basic home user in mind and will allow them to manage, edit, and share their photos and videos with friends and family. As with everything, if you want more functionality you can always pay for third party software with more bells and whistles but most people won’t have to do that.