i am retired and my wife loves taking pictures nature.

i have an old windows xp limited gb 60 or so. should i learn on this or get a different pc.so as to transfer from her camera
or how does she send them to walgreens for making copies etc. seems like an easier way and i would like to help her.ps what kind of camera for her would be best. middle beginer?

thanx for your time.

dave

do i need a pc with memory reader card?
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I love that search box in the upper-right corner of Explorer windows (you know, Documents, Pictures, etc). Of course, you can type in it to find files by their name or contents, but you can also search by date or several other criteria using Advanced Query Search (AQS).

Let’s say I want to find pictures taken on New Year’s Eve, 2006. I’ll type date:december31, 2006 and press Enter. Windows Vista immediately shows all my files modified on that date.

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You can group files in Explorer to make them easier to browse. This is especially useful for pictures. Let’s say you want to find a picture you took last week, but you took an awful lot of pictures. Hover your cursor over the Date taken heading, and then click the down-arrow. Then, click Group. You can also right-click the folder, click Group By, and then click Date modified.

Windows Vista groups your files by date. Now, you can also manage them using that grouping. Click the down-arrow to collapse a group, and click it again to expand it. Click the line itself to select the entire group so you can easily delete or move the files.

If you have too many files in a folder, or in search results, you can quickly narrow it down if you know when the file approximate date the file was modified.
In Explorer, hover your cursor over the Date Modified column. When the down-arrow appears, click it. Then, select the date ranges you want to see. Windows Vista filters the display to show only the files or folders in the selected range.

You can do this for any of the columns–Type and Date are also very useful.

Riccardo Raneri demonstrates how to use a free tool from Microsoft, Group Photo Fixer. To use it for your next group photo, take several shots of the group. That’s a good idea anyway–with digital cameras, pictures are free, but so many people still only take a single photo. After you load your pictures onto your computer, if you discover that no one photo has everyone smiling with their eyes open, you can swap a person’s face from another photo. Give it a shot.

Update: James O’ Neill provides another interesting use for this tool–removing moving objects from a still image, such as crowds or cars walking in front of what you want to shoot. I could have used that in Pompeii.

Explorer windows in Vista offer several different layouts. To switch between them, click Oraganize on the toolbar, click Layout, and then select or clear the panes you want to see.

For example, the Preview pane isn’t shown by default. It’s useful if you’re browsing pictures, though, because you can see a larger version of the pic. After the jump, a screenshot of the Preview pane enabled.

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If you’re like me, most of your pictures don’t have useful filenames. You probably find them by looking at thumbnails. By default, the thumbnails are really small, though.

To make bigger thumbnails, click Views on the Explorer toolbar, and then drag the slider up to the top (or as far up as you want–the higher you drag, the bigger they get). Windows Vista might spend a few seconds making your bigger thumbnails, but it only needs to do this one.