I have to admit that I haven’t really gotten to play around with Windows Vista since I’m just using it straight up as an OS to launch all my other applications. In fact, I’d have to say that I haven’t really been impressed by Vista. However, now that I’ve gotten to tinkering around some of the newer things that it has to offer, I’m beginning to appreciate some things about it, like Windows Photo Gallery.

Photo Gallery is a tweaked out utility that comes default with Windows Vista that is an much-improved version of the Image and Fax viewer that XP had. A quick way to launch it is to hit the Windows key, type in “gal” and select Windows Photo Gallery. And here are just some of the things that you can do with it to organize and tweak your picture without really having to launch another program. Here are some things that you can do with it.

• You can add metadata in your pictures. This helps especially for quick retrieval of media using your own keywords. Organize and sort pictures via tags. To do this, just click on any picture and using the Info pane, put or revise the information that you want. You can even sort them according to the date.
• Hovering your mouse pointer over the thumbnails. To preview the picture using a much larger space, just double-click the thumbnail.
• To start the slideshow conveniently hit F11.
• You can even start importing pictures from other devices. This can be done by clicking File and selecting Import from Camera or Scanner. Likewise you can just simply print if you’d like a concrete copy of your pictures.