Windows 8 deep dive: Get to know your Photos app

November 15, 2012

It's easy to take a good photo management app for granted. Now that we store and share so many of our photos online, the value of a good program for organizing, displaying, and editing images can be difficult to appreciate—until you find yourself without one. In the past I was happy to stick with the default Windows Photo Viewer, but there's no Windows Photo Viewer app in the Windows Store. In its place you'll find Photos, a media management app designed by Microsoft to make it easy for you to view photos and videos from disparate devices and social networks in one central location. If that's all you want your photo management app to do, Photos has you covered. But if you want to edit or organize your photos, you'll need more power than Photos provides. Thankfully, an App Store is built into every copy of Windows 8, with plenty of alternatives available in it. But before we get to those, let's look at what Photos does—and doesn't do—best. What Photos does well Photos does an adequate job of pulling your photos from disparate devices and services, organizing them, and presenting them to you in a pleasant, easy-to-navigate interface. If you're using Windows 8 on a tablet that has a high-quality screen, launching the Photos app transforms your device into a slick photo album that lets you swipe seamlessly back and forth through images from your DSLR camera, Facebook, SkyDrive account, and other PCs on your network. Navigating through your photos feels intuitive. Tap an album to open it, swipe back and forth between images, or pinch to zoom out and see an entire album at a glance. When you zoom out, you'll notice that Photos shrinks your images to the size of a thumbnail, algorithmically cropping and orienting each thumbnail based on the components of the image. It's a small but welcome luxury, especially if you're fed up with squinting at image tiles or the preview pane in Windows 7. If you just need a slick platform for browsing through your photos and videos, the Photos app is a reasonable option. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013989/windows-8-deep-dive-get-to-know-your-photos-app.html