A tag-oriented tour of the Windows Vista Photo Gallery (Channel 9)

This 14-minute screencast with Scott Dart focuses on the tagging features of Vista's Photo Gallery. It captures an interesting moment in the history of information management. Historically we've relied on folder hierachy to organize large collections of digital files. You can still use folders in Photo Gallery, but tagging and search have become the power tools for organizing and finding things. That's how things work on the web, and Photo Gallery is a leading example of how that workstyle can play on the desktop.

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Ray6

Feb 21, 2007 at 12:44 AM

Yep, I've been a big fan of tagging apps since I bought Photoshop Elements. If you have a heirarchy of tags and the ability to order objects within the tag, then you have everything a folder can do, and you can have elements that exist in more than one place.

I've been playing around with EverNote, which also adds the ability to 'autotag' elements based on their content. Always thought that the OneNote team missed a trick here.
JonUdell

Feb 21, 2007 at 7:33 AM

"I've been playing around with EverNote, which also adds the ability to 'autotag' elements based on their content. "

Does EverNote deal with the question of how the info you create and collect locally can relate to stuff you create and collect on the web?

Over on my blog we've been exploring the whole question of where metadata lives, and how it travels (or doesn't). These are pretty deep and important questions, I think.
Ray6

Feb 21, 2007 at 7:57 AM

JonUdell wrote:

Does EverNote deal with the question of how the info you create and collect locally can relate to stuff you create and collect on the web?

Could you give me an example?
JonUdell

Feb 21, 2007 at 9:16 AM

"Could you give me an example?"

Example: I tag my blog entries locally when I write them, but when I post I also inject bookmarks with tags into del.icio.us. I do that partly for my own personal information management reasons, and partly for the social effects that happen on del.icio.us, and in the network of services that connect to del.icio.us.

Photo Gallery's "truth is in the file" strategy[1] is an enabler for that kind of strategy.

---

1. http://blog.jonudell.net/?s=truth%20is%20in%20the%20file
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Feb 21, 2007 at 9:59 AM

So... this flash video doesn't do anything for me on IE7/XP. It just keeps loading perpetually without any network activity. Anybody else having the same problem?
JonUdell

Feb 21, 2007 at 12:34 PM

Bas wrote:

So... this flash video doesn't do anything for me on IE7/XP. It

Sorry about that.

It's OK for me on IE7 and FF in XP and Vista, also FF on OS X.

Nevertheless I'll start a WMV cranking as well. What with all those photos in the video, it's a /long/ compression cycle.
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Feb 21, 2007 at 1:32 PM

Odd. I guess the problem lies with me, but I can't see what's causing it. I'll give it a try on Vista later today, the subject matter sounds appealing.
daSmirnov

Feb 21, 2007 at 1:43 PM

Bas wrote:

Odd. I guess the problem lies with me, but I can't see what's causing it. I'll give it a try on Vista later today, the subject matter sounds appealing.

Same here, on two of my machines both running IE7 and Vista.
JonUdell

Feb 21, 2007 at 2:12 PM

daSmirnov wrote:

Bas wrote: Odd. I guess the problem lies with me, but I can't see what's causing it. I'll give it a try on Vista later today, the subject matter sounds appealing.

Same here, on two of my machines both running IE7 and Vista.

OK I see the problem. Since last I checked here, the entry was regenerated with a View SWF button that is erroneous. In this case I couldn't use SWF because the filesize exploded to 300MB with all the photo data. So I made an FLV instead, which is what's linked to from the word screencast in the writeup. That link is:

http:/channel9.msdn.com/Media/PhotoGallery.html

I don't think we have a way to automatically make a View FLV.

Meanwhile I have completed the WMV which you can get here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Media/PhotoGallery.wmv

Sorry for the mixup.
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Feb 21, 2007 at 2:43 PM

Excellent, both of those work for me here. Thanks for the effort!
Bas It finds lightbulbs.

Feb 22, 2007 at 7:40 AM

Excellent video, it was a bit hard to follow sometimes due to the audio quality and sort of ad-hoc nature, but it was a great display of some of the features.

Navigating by tags is an amazing system, it just works so well. I'm hoping that for the next Windows version, the radical step of ditching the file/folder/drive structure is taken. Navigation by tags works just as well, but ads a lot more. I'm noticing that for WHS, they're at least getting rid of drive letters with their hard disk pooling system. A sign of things to come?

Good video guys, I'm looking forward to more overviews like these of stuff that's included in Vista.