With this release, Windows Live Photo Gallery becomes more of a full-fledged consumer photo editing tool/organizer on a par with the Apple’s iPhoto ($79 Direct, 4 stars), Google’s Picasa (Free, 4 stars); it even matches some of Adobe Photoshop Elements’ power ($99.99 direct, 4 stars). The new big-ticket features in Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 are face recognition and geotagging, but the application as a whole feels more polished and powerful than earlier incarnations.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Installation Choices
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Start Importing
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Import Groups
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Home View

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Interface
Windows Live Photo Gallery’s new release now feels more like a full-blown image editing application than it has in any previous version, yet manages to maintain its ease of use for general consumers. The main window is now adorned with an Office-like ribbon toolbar across the top; and the new Find tab lets you filter by keyword, rating, date, face, and more. Below the ribbon is a three-panel interface, showing your folders on the left, the images in the middle, and actions like tagging and editing in a right pane.

As in more advanced photo apps like Lightroom, double-clicking an image in Windows Live Photo Gallery brings it up, and doing so again returns you to gallery view. At the bottom right, there are rotate image arrows, next and previous buttons, and a zoom slider that lets you size both thumbnails and single image view to whatever zoom level you want (the mouse wheel can also be used for zooming). Holding the left mouse button lets you pan around the photo, which I found to be a very fluid way of navigating images.
Specifications

Type
Personal, Professional
Free
Yes
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows 7

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I do wish the left panel offered a Last Import option the way iPhoto does. The Find tab, however, can fill this role; it lets you limit the gallery view by date, month, or year taken, as well as by the people in the pictures, star ratings, and flagged status. You can also click the binocular icon to search within those results. If the default interface doesn’t suit you, you can customize it by adding or subtracting options from a quick access toolbar located either below the ribbon or up in the window border to save viewing space.

Photo Importing
The import experience is just what you’d want. As you import, you can group photos by date and time, add tags, add the date to filenames, and now set a base file name. Raw camera files are supported, but only if you’ve installed your camera manufacturer’s codec in Windows. Fortunately, gallery tells you if you need to do this, and it even takes you to the camera manufacturer’s download site.

I found working with large raw files slower in Windows Live Photo Gallery than in pro-level apps like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299 Street, ), and unlike iPhoto and Picasa image adjustments didn’t work with raw images.

Photo Editing
All the expected photo adjustments are on offer: cropping, red-eye fixing, straightening, exposure, color correction, and even noise reduction. Buttons let you apply fixes automatically, but a “Fine tune” button offers deeper control (such as an adjustable histogram, highlights, shadows, sharpness, and color temperature). This version adds a new tool: Blemish removal, which worked excellently in my testing, as did the red-eye fix.

An Auto-adjust option lets you configure what you want fixed—any combination of exposure, color, NR, and straightening. It did a mostly good job on my test images, never drastically exaggerating brightness or other factors, as some editors occasionally do. The editing is non-destructive, so, at any point, you can revert to the original. A new batch edit lets you apply fixes to a bunch of selected images at once, but it only works with the auto-fixes—color, exposure, straightening, and noise reduction—not with the fine-tuning.

Jazzing Up Photos
Gallery doesn’t offer frivolous frames, doodads, or wild effects to embellish your pictures the way some tools like Roxio do. Instead, it gives you a few tools for tasteful effects: Sepia, cyan, and black and white. The app’s panorama-stitching feature has long been impressive for a free tool; iPhoto or Picasa still don’t offer an equivalent ability.

An innovative new Photo Fuse option lets you get everyone’s best look in group photo composited from multiple shots. It’s sort of a companion to the application’s panoramic stitch tool, and comparable to what you find in Adobe Photoshop Elements. My results were intriguing but not perfect—some people ended up with big hair, or worse, two ears on one side of the head.

Photo Gallery now joins Elements, iPhoto, and Picasa in offering a retouching tool for blemishes. It worked beautifully at correcting skin discolorations in my tests, and more simply than Picasa’s, which requires you to select a source and target area.

We’ve been big fans of Google’s Picasa photo software for years—it’s been our Editor’s Choice for entry-level photo organizing and editing since version 2. Version 3.8 adds even more polish, with “Face Movies” (more on this later), batch uploading, integrated editing with Picnik, and an extended Info panel. These join Picasa’s already astounding face-recognition, geo-tagging, leading ease-of-use, and integration with Picasa Web Albums. So no matter what your computer’s operating system, Picasa is the best choice for digital photo fans who want the best way to organize, improve, and share their digital photos.

Interface
Picasa has one of the most innovative, intuitive, and usable interfaces around. Instead of using a standard scrollbar to move through your photo sets, you get a “shuttle”-type control that accelerates you through the galleries. This makes a lot of sense, especially after you’ve built up a good size library of galleries. The interface view is of the three-panel ilk, with source organization on the left—albums, people, dated folders, the thumbnail or full image in the center, and options and info on a left panel for things like tags, people places and camera EXIF metadata. A further metadata improvement in version 3.8 is the ability to display standard Adobe XMP info, which includes info like titles and descriptions.
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Google Picasa 3.8: People and Places
Picasa 3.8: Importing Gets Easier
Picasa 3.8: Unnamed People Album
Picasa 3.8: Naming the Unnamed

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Updating Picasa to version 3.8 is an automatic snap, once you check in the Help menu for updates. This downloads, closes, and installs the new version without requiring any futher intervention on your part. And it didn’t require long reprocessing of the images as the Apple iPhoto ’11 update did. If you’re installing for the first time, you’ll get a choice of having the app scan your hard disk or just My Documents, My Pictures, and the desktop for image files. The scan is fast, and a small gray bar on the right-hand side of your screen shows its progress. From then on, any photos added to those folders will be imported automatically into Picasa. This automation beats that of enthusiast-level app Photoshop Elements, in which you have to specify the exact folder of images to manage.
Specifications

Type
Personal
Free
Yes
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows XP

More

Next, a dialog proposes that you use Picasa’s Photo Viewer as a replacement for Windows’ Preview, the default app launched when you double-click an image file’s entry in Windows Explorer. The viewer gives easy access to editing, uploading, and slideshow playing, and on a fast system its startup delay won’t be significant. Picasa’s viewer also takes an interesting approach to displaying an image by centering it with no border, graying out the rest of your screen.

You don’t get Apple iPhoto’s slick thumbnail skimming, but you get a couple more important abilities, like being able to zoom or rename a photo whether you’re in library or edit view. There’s also Picasa’s handy hand tool that lets you drag around large, zoomed in images, rather than just using iPhoto’s thumbnail navigator. On Windows, Picasa can match iPhoto’s full-screen view, but the Mac version can’t, and the darker iPhoto interface does give more prominence to your images.

As you’d expect from a Google product, Picasa’s search feature is top-notch, including searching by tags, captions, date, and camera. Convenient buttons let you limit the library view to show just movies or photos that you’ve starred, uploaded photos, or those containing people or geo-tags. iPhoto has a powerful search box, but it lacks the quick filtering buttons, while Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 offers a Find tab with comprehensive searching options.

Import and Organize
When it comes to importing and organizing your pictures, Picasa is alone in its class. Even before importing, it organizes photos by time groups, and you can view, rotate, and star photos. To its credit, Windows Live Photo Gallery adds the ability to add tags during import, though it can’t rotate and star.

It also had no trouble with camera RAW files in my tests, to which it could apply all its fixes and enhancements. iPhoto, too, works fully with RAW files, but Windows Live Photo Gallery can only import and display them—no editing. Picasa helpfully shows a text overlay saying “Rendering” when the image hasn’t displayed to full resolution; with iPhoto, by contrast, you have to eyeball and guess when the image has reached full res.

As with iPhoto, Picasa’s photos are automatically organized by date, you can create your own albums with pictures from any folders; adding photos from anywhere within Picasa is easier than in Apple’s iPhoto ’11, though, with a simple right-click option. Photo Gallery only uses folders, rather than albums.

But the one organizational tool that makes Picasa shine brighter than the rest is in its face recognition. All three major entry-level photo apps have gotten really good that this, but Picasa does the best job of identifying your photo subjects’ visages. The program automatically scans images for faces, and creates an Unnamed folder under People in the source list. After you identify some people, the program suggests more potential photos with likely faces to match the names.

In my tests, I found Picasa’s People feature and Windows Live Photo Gallery’s, similar feature both made good guesses about people’s identity earlier than iPhoto did. Picasa’s process of confirming faces was slightly quicker. In iPhoto and Windows Live Photo Gallery, I was presented with inanimate objects that looked like faces. All three let me play slideshows of just pictures containing a selected face, but Picasa was the only that could create a “Face Movie” of images zoomed in to show just the faces.

I do like iPhoto’s full-window Place’s map that can show all the places in the world your photos were taken, but Picasa did just as good a job finding specific locations for your photos using a search box, and more importantly, it preserves face and geo-tags for photos uploaded to its Web Albums. Neither iPhoto nor Windows Live Photo Gallery offer maps on their Web galleries. A separate Geotagging feature also lets you place your Photos on the Google Earth globe.

Edit and Enhance
Picasa makes it dead simple to get your photos looking good, even if you didn’t have all the settings right when you took the shot. Its “I’m Feeling Lucky” button did at least as good a job at one-click photo fixing as iPhoto. In most cases, Picasa did better than Windows Live Photo Gallery, though I liked how the latter’s autofix straightened pictures as well as attempting to fix lighting and color. Picasa actually trails those two in that it doesn’t let you manipulate a photo’s histogram.

Picasa’s red-eye correction works well and, like iPhoto’s, finds and corrects all eyes automatically. Windows Live Photo Gallery still makes you find the eyes yourself and drag a box around them, but its results are fine. I got slightly better results with iPhoto’s blemish retouch tool than Picasa’s or Windows’, but Picasa lets you choose a neighboring area to match the color of the area you want to fix, which can be helpful in some cases.

For fun effects Picasa was on par with iPhoto, adding matte and vignette effects to the usual black-and-white, sepia, and saturation. Picasa adds the very cool “Focal B&W” effect which puts all but a target object in the image in B&W; and with version 3.8 Picasa now adds an “Edit with Picnik” button, which integrates the well-regarded online photo app to add a slew more effects.