Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Photo Gallery is a discontinued image organizer, photo editor and photo sharing program. It is a part of Microsoft's Windows Essentials software suite.
Key features included photo management with tagging and metadata support, basic photo editing capabilities, and integration with online services such as OneDrive, Flickr, and Facebook for easy sharing.
The product has been unavailable for download since January 10, 2017, as the Windows Essentials line of products have been discontinued.
Features
Windows Photo Gallery provides management, tagging, and searching capabilities for digital photos. It provides an image viewer that can replace the default OS image viewer, and a photo import tool that can be used to acquire photos from a camera or other removable media. Windows Photo Gallery also allows sharing of photos by uploading them to OneDrive, Windows Live Groups, Flickr and Facebook.Photo management
Windows Photo Gallery provides the ability to organize digital photo collection in its Gallery view, by adding titles, rating, captions, and custom metadata tags to photos. There is also limited support for tagging and managing video files, though not editing them.Windows Photo Gallery uses the concept of hierarchical tagging to organise photos. Deleting a tag from Windows Photo Gallery will also remove it from all photos in the utility. Adobe Systems's Extensible Metadata Platform metadata standard, a descendant of the ubiquitous Exif standard which almost all digital cameras currently support, is also supported. This allows for data such as the tags to be stored and edited much more efficiently than EXIF or IPTC.
Since Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011, geotagging and people tagging is also supported. For some supported image file types, People Tags can be read and saved using the Microsoft People Tag XMP Schema.
Photo editing
Windows Photo Gallery allows photos to be edited for exposure or color correction. It also provides other basic photo editing functions, such as resizing, cropping, and red-eye reduction. Users can view a photo's color histogram, which allows them to adjust the photo's shadows, highlights and sharpness. Further, Windows Photo Gallery also includes editing tools such as blemish remover and noise reduction.Photo editing technologies developed by Microsoft Research, including Panoramic stitching, Photo Fuse, and AutoCollage are also included in Windows Photo Gallery.
Windows Photo Gallery also supports the ability to batch resize photos, where multiple photos can be resized in one single action, as well as the ability to rotate videos.
Photo and video import
Windows Photo Gallery's photo/video import tool provides the ability to view, select, and tag photos that are automatically grouped by date-taken.Format support
Windows Photo Gallery is based on the PIX engine which uses the Windows Imaging Component library. The application has native metadata handling and tagging support and since the Windows Imaging Component is extensible, it can organize and view any image format for which a third party WIC codec is installed. Therefore, the supported formats depend on the Windows version, additional WIC codecs for QuickTime/raw image formats/Webp, and platform updates, e.g., JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, HD Photo.wdp, and GIF images, as well as most common video formats. Windows Photo Gallery uses the Windows Color System. Legacy image formats such as PCX and WMF without WIC codec cannot be viewed. For animated GIFs only individual frames are shown.