2. Watching and Managing Movies with Windows Live Photo Gallery
While the new Videos library is the primary movie
management tool in Windows 7, there are other ways in which you can
manage videos. Believe it or not, one is Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Why Microsoft didn't choose to name this Windows Photo and Movie
Gallery is unclear, but the fact remains that you can organize and
manage (and even play) virtually all of the digital video on your
system with this tool.
By default, Windows Live Photo Gallery enables you
to manage photos and videos together, and it's designed to search the
My Pictures, My Videos, Public Pictures, and Public Videos folders for
video (and photo) content by default.
NOTE
Notice anything odd there? That's right: Windows
Live Photo Gallery doesn't (currently) use the same Libraries
management system that's exposed by Windows 7. Instead, it manually
monitors specific folder locations on its own. So, if you do manually
include other folder locations in the Videos library, these locations
will not be monitored by Windows Live Photo Gallery unless you manually
add them to the Gallery. We assume that a future version of Windows
Live Photo Gallery will be updated for a more seamless experience in
Windows 7.
When it comes to video, all the metadata application
information works equally well with movies as it does with photos. That
is, you can add tags, ratings, and captions to movies, just as you can
with photos. That said, we don't expect many people will actually take
advantage of that functionality because it's time consuming and,
ultimately, of little value.
If you want to work just with movies in Windows Live
Photo Gallery, you must multi-select the video-oriented entries under
All photos and videos in the application's View By pane. (Use
Ctrl+click to make that happen.) Now, you will see just videos in the
Thumbnails pane, as shown in Figure 5.
As you mouse over individual videos, a pop-up window
displays, showing a larger thumb-nail, along with other information
about the file, including its name, size, rating, and the date and time
it was created. You can see this effect in Figure 6.
NOTE
If you want to discover where an individual
video is located in the file system, right-click it in Windows Live
Photo Gallery and choose Open file location.
To play a video, simply double-click it. Curiously,
videos opened in Windows Live Photo Gallery play in Windows Live Photo
Gallery—and not in Windows Media Player, as you might expect. This is
undesirable for a few reasons, but the most obvious is that the video
playback pane in Windows Live Photo Gallery is only as large as the
application window, which is often larger than the original video,
causing blurry resizing effects. As shown in Figure 7, Windows Live Photo Gallery isn't the optimal place to play video files.
But you don't have to view videos this way. Instead,
you can right-click a video file from within Windows Live Photo Gallery
and then choose "Open with" from the pop-up menu. You'll see a list of
applicable applications, including those that come with Windows 7 and
any compatible third-party applications you may have installed yourself.
NOTE
There's no way to configure Windows Live Photo Gallery to always open video files in another application. Instead, you must choose a different application, manually, each time.
