Are you one of those people who is addicted to documenting your life? These days, it’s hard not to be, especially with products like the iPhone 4, which even makes taking a self-portrait easy, and the variety of easy-to-use, low-cost point and shoots on the market.

 

 

Best Microsoft MCTS Training – Microsoft MCITP Training at Certkingdom.com

 

And dealing with those images has never been easier thanks to products like Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011. Part of Windows Essentials 2011, Photo Gallery is a definite upgrade from the way Windows previously handled photos and videos.

Getting started is simple: Pop your memory card or USB into your PC and Photo Gallery detects pictures and videos automatically. An AutoPlay window appears, asking you whether you want to import your photos via Photo Gallery. From that point, you are a mouse click away from having your photos downloaded to a centralized folder.

Of course, for all of the budding Ansel Adams out there, one of the biggest challenges of digital photography is organization. You can often find me scrolling through hundreds of photos, trying to find that one image. Now that personal photography is basically free, we’re all taking tons and tons of photos. Inevitably, they get misplaced, misfiled, or loaded into folders so bloated they’re nearly unusable.

Photo Gallery remedies this problem. It attempts to impose some simple order, grouping photos initially by date. Later, as you build out your photo repository, a “Find” tab right in the menu bar allows you to search for and organize photos by date, the people in the photo, your own ratings, tags, text, and more.
View Slideshow See all (6) slides

Hey, Don’t I Know You?
An even better way to search and sort is through face recognition. To tag a person, you double-click on a photograph in your gallery. Next, go to the “Edit” tab. As you move your cursor over a face, a dialogue box will pop up, asking you “Who is this?” If you click on a face, your existing contacts will show up, allowing you to streamline the process of tagging people already in your contact list.

Of course, the recognition gets better over time, meaning that the more people you tag and the more often you tag those people, the better Photo Gallery gets at suggesting tags down the line. It recognizes facial similarities from photo to photo, making tagging nearly automatic as your collection grows. I found that it took around a dozen tagged photos of a person for Gallery to “know” them.

To add other tags or captions, or to view existing ones, click on the “Tag and caption” pane and select a photo. If the photo already contains people tags, those will appear in the “Tag and caption” pane. If an untagged face is detected, move your cursor to the person’s face and click on “Who is this?” You can then add a new tag when prompted.

You can also find the people you’ve tagged, making searching for specific photos much easier. On the Find tab in the People group, you can see thumbnails of all of the people you’ve tagged. To see the collection of photos of a specific person in the gallery, click that person’s thumbnail. Photo Gallery will also detect photos with a similar face that are not yet tagged and recommend their inclusion.