Windows Vista Photo Gallery frustrations
I have one big complaint though. The photo import for digital cameras. Why do all the photo apps insist on using the "film roll" metaphor? They all seem to want to organize the filesystem storage based on the date that you import them into the photo app. This is my biggest complaint about iPhoto as well so I'm not just picking on MS. ALL digicams these days stamp the date and time of the picture in the EXIF data. Why cant we use this data for naming the folders and files? Windows Photo Gallery can use this data but in a VERY limited way. I have all my photos organized like this on the file system:
My Pictures\2006\May\2006-05-01 12-05-37_1.jpgThis makes it very easy to make backups of the photos because they are organized by the date and time they were taken. In the age of 1-8Gig flash cards you can take alot of pictures before importing them so the date that you get around to loading them onto the computer really has little or no meaning. This system works really well when you have tons of photos. I'll use tagging features of photo apps to organize by event types and such. I can use photo gallery to tag the pictures as "birthday" and such. But when it comes to the filesystem structure I need more control!
or
My Pictures\Year\Month\YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS_#.jpg
It's worth noting that no photo manager out there really supports photo renaming and filesystem organizing very well. This is why I have to use Downloader Pro today.
I really hope MS gives me more options for naming the folders and files during the photo import process. If its too hard for the grandmas to use just bury it in an advanced dialog or something I dont care. As long as I can get the filesystem structure above I'll be happy as a clam.