Chapter 17
Fiddling with Photos (and Videos)
In This Chapter
Copying your camera’s photos and videos into your computer
Taking photos with your computer’s camera
Viewing photos in your Pictures folder
Saving digital photos to a CD
Today’s digital cameras are little computers in their own right, so it’s natural that Windows treats them like newfound friends. Plug a camera into your computer, turn on the camera, and Windows greets the newcomer. A few clicks later, and Windows copies your camera’s photos and videos onto your computer.
Windows treats a smartphone just like a regular digital camera, making it just as easy to transfer photos from your phone.
This chapter walks you through moving your digital photos into your computer, showing off photos to friends and family, e-mailing them to distant relatives, and saving them in places where you can easily find them again.
One final note: After you’ve begun creating a digital family album on your computer, please take steps to back it up properly by turning on File History, the automatic backup feature in Windows that I describe in Chapter 13. (This chapter explains how to copy your photos to a CD or DVD, as well.) Computers come and go, but your family memories can’t be replaced.
Dumping a Camera’s Photos into Your Computer
Most digital cameras come with software that grabs your camera’s photos and places them into your computer. But you needn’t install that software or even bother trying to figure out its menus, thank goodness.
The built-in software in Windows easily fetches photos from nearly any make and model of digital camera, as well as most smartphones. It even lets you group your camera’s photo sessions into different folders, each named after the event.
Although these steps work for most digital cameras and Android smartphones, iPhone owners must go through iTunes to copy their photos to their computer.
To import photos from your camera or smartphone into your computer, follow these steps:
Plug the phone or camera’s cable into your computer.
Most cameras come with two cables: one that plugs into your TV set for viewing, and another that plugs into your computer. You need to find the one that plugs into your computer for transferring photos. (With smart phones, your USB charging cable handles the job.)
Plug the transfer cable’s small end into your camera or smartphone, and plug the larger end (shown in the margin) into your computer’s USB port, a rectangular-looking hole about ½-inch long and ¼-inch high. USB ports live on the back of the older computers, along the front of newer computers, and along the sides of laptops and tablets.
If the USB plug doesn’t want to fit into the port, turn over the plug and try again. (It fits only one way.)Turn on your phone or camera (if it’s not already turned on) and wait for File Explorer to recognize it.
Open File Explorer (shown in the margin) from the taskbar along the bottom of your screen and click the This PC icon from the program’s left edge. File Explorer lists all of the storage devices available to your PC, including your camera or phone.
When recognized, your camera appears as an icon (shown in the margin) in File Explorer’s This PC section.If you plug in an Android smartphone, be sure to tell it to connect in “Camera Mode” mode rather than “Media Device” mode. Your phone appears as a camera icon.
If Windows doesn’t recognize your camera, make sure that the camera is set to display mode — the mode where you can see your photos on the camera’s display. If you still have problems, unplug the cable from your computer, wait a few seconds, and then plug it back in.
Right-click your camera or phone, choose Import Pictures and Videos from the pop-up menu, and choose how to import your photos.
The Import Pictures and Videos window, shown in Figure 17-1, offers two options for handling your newly recognized digital camera or smartphone:
- Review, Organize, and Group Items to Import: Designed for cameras holding photos from several sessions, this option lets you sort your photos into groups, copying each group to a different folder. It takes more time, but it’s a handy way to separate your Hawaiian vacation photos into folders named after each island. If you prefer this option, move to Step 5.
- Import All New Items Now: Designed for cameras holding only one photo session, this much simpler approach copies every photo into one folder. If you choose this option, move to Step 4.
Clicking the words More Options, shown in the bottom left of Figure 17-1, lets you change where Windows places your imported photos, as well as whether Windows should delete them from the camera after importing them. It’s worth a look-see because it lets you undo any options you’ve mistakenly chosen when importing your previous batch of photos.Select the Import All New Items Now option, type a short description into the Add Tags box, and click Next.
Type a descriptive word into the Add Tags box — Hawaii Trip, for example — and click Next. Windows copies everything into a folder named after the date and the word “Hawaii Trip.” It also names every file “Hawaii Trip 001,” “Hawaii Trip 002,” and so on. You’re done! To see your photos, open your Pictures folder and look for your newly named folder.
Adding a descriptive word or phrase makes your photos much easier to find later. To fetch them, type their tag into the Start menu’s Search box, and Windows lists them all.Click the Review, Organize, and Group items to Import button, and click the Next button.
Windows examines the time and date you snapped each of your photos. Then the program tentatively separates your photos into groups for your approval, as shown in Figure 17-2.
Adjust the time grouping, if necessary, to keep related photos in the same place.
Don’t like the Windows choice of groups? Then change them by sliding the Adjust Groups bar to the left or right. Slide to the left for lots of small groups, sorted by every half-hour you snapped a photo. Keep sliding to the right for fewer groups. Slide to the farthest right, and Windows places everything into one group, meaning they all go into one folder.
Can’t remember what’s in a group of photos? Click the words View All Items to the left of each group. That lets you view the photos and decide whether they’re important enough to warrant their own folder.Approve the chosen groups, name the groups’ folders, add descriptive tags, and then click the Import button.
Name each group by clicking the words Enter a Name and then typing a descriptive title. The title becomes the new folder’s name.
In the Add Tags area for each group, type in descriptive words about the photo session, separating each word with a semicolon. By tagging your photos, you can easily find them later with the Windows Search program, described in Chapter 7.
After you’ve named the groups and added tags, click the Import button to finish the job.
If you don’t delete your camera’s photos after Windows copies them into your computer, you won’t have room to take more photos. As Windows begins grabbing your photos, you can select the Erase after Importing check box, shown in Figure 17-3. That tells Windows to erase the camera’s photos, saving you the trouble of manually deleting them with your camera’s awkward menus.When Windows finishes importing your photos, it displays the folder containing your new pictures.
Figure 17-1: The Import Pictures and Videos window offers to copy your camera’s files to your computer.
Figure 17-2: Windows offers groups of pictures based on the time and date you took them. You can review and modify the groups before importing.
Figure 17-3: If desired, select the Erase after Importing check box to free up space on your camera for more photos.
Taking Photos with the Camera App
Most tablets, laptops, and some desktop computers come with built-in cameras, sometimes called webcams. Their tiny cameras can’t take high-resolution close-ups of that rare bird in the neighbor’s tree, but they work fine for their main purpose: snapping a quick headshot photo for use as an account photo on your computer, Facebook, or other websites.
To take a photo through your computer’s camera with the Camera app, follow these steps:
From the Start menu, click the Camera tile to open the app.
If the app asks permission to use your camera and microphone or location, decide whether to click Yes or No.
As a security precaution, Windows asks permission to turn on your camera. That helps prevent sneaky apps from spying on you without your knowing. If you’re using the camera app, then click the Yes button to give it permission.
The program might also ask for permission for your location to stamp your photo with its location information. That’s handy to have when traveling, but it can be an invasion of privacy when at your house or that of a friend.
After you grant approval, the computer screen turns into a giant viewfinder, showing you exactly what the camera sees: your face.
If your computer or tablet includes two cameras (usually one in front and one in back), you can toggle between them by clicking the Change Camera icon, shown in Figure 17-4.
- Click the Camera icon to snap a photo or click the Video icon to begin recording a movie. (Click the Video icon again to stop recording.)
Figure 17-4: Choose your camera’s options and then click the Camera icon for a snapshot or the Video icon for a movie.
The camera app saves all your snapped photos and videos in a folder called Camera Roll in your Pictures folder. However, if you chose to use OneDrive when setting up your Microsoft account, your built-in camera’s photos is also backed up on OneDrive. (I explain how to change OneDrive’s behavior in Chapter 5.)
Viewing Photos with the Photos App
Brace yourself because Windows 10 includes two ways to view your digital photos on your computer: the Windows 10 Photos app and the desktop’s Photo Viewer, a Windows staple for nearly a decade.
Microsoft clearly plans for you to reach for the Windows 10 Photos app. It’s a quick way to put your photos on display in either of two ways:
- Collection: When opened, the Photos app shows all of your photos, sorted by the order you snapped them. Although it leaves nothing out, it’s overkill unless you’re ready to sit down and weed out the bad ones.
- Albums: The Photos app takes a more curated approach here, breaking them down into photo sessions named after the day they were shot. It automatically weeds out duplicates, making for a short but sweet way to show off your highlights.
The next two sections explain how to use each display method, and when they come in handy.
Viewing your photo collection
When opened, the Photos app automatically grabs your photos and places them on the screen in large thumbnails, sorted by the date you took them. That makes it easy to show off the latest vacation photos on a tablet, smartphone, or even a computer that’s hooked up to a TV or large monitor.
The app even performs subtle photo tweaks when showing them, enhancing the highlights and straightening those tilted horizons.
To launch the Photos app and start showing off your photos, follow these steps:
From the Start menu, click the Photos tile.
The Photos app quickly appears, shown in Figure 17-5. The Photos app searches for photos in your computer’s Pictures folder, as well your OneDrive folders, and displays them one group, all in the order they were taken.
The Photos app also appears when you open a photo on the desktop’s File Explorer. (I explain how to browse your files with File Explorer in Chapter 5.)
Scroll down to the photo you want to view or edit.
The Photos app displays your photos in one long stream, without folders. Called simply Collection, the scrolling display places your most recently shot photos at the top, with the oldest ones at the bottom.
Scroll down with a mouse by using the scroll bar along the app’s right edge. On a touchscreen, just slide your finger up or down the screen to see newer or older photos.
Click a photo to see it full-screen and then choose any menu option to view, navigate, manipulate, or share your pictures.
When a photo fills the screen, shown and labelled in Figure 17-6, sometimes the menus are hidden. You can bring the menus into view by either moving your mouse or clicking (or tapping) the photo. When the menus appear, you can control the app and photos in a variety of ways:
Next/Previous photo: Move your mouse anywhere on the photo, and arrows appear on the photo’s left and right edges. Click the right arrow to see newer photos or click the left arrow to see older photos.
Return to collection: Return to the thumbnail view of your photos by clicking the left-pointing arrow in the photo’s top-left corner. (You may need to click or tap the currently displayed photo before it appears.)
Share the photo: Click the Share button to share the photo with apps that can handle the job. (Chances are good that the Mail app appears, ready to e-mail the photo to your destination.)
Slide show: A click of this button clears the screen, and then the app begins cycling through all of your photos, showing each one for about five seconds before moving to the next. (Click any photo to stop the slide show.)
Enhance: The Photo app automatically enhances your photos to look their best. Click the Enhance button to turn off the enhancement if you think it looks better au naturel.
Edit: This brings a new menu for editing the currently viewed photo. Click the X in the photo’s upper-right corner to exit the editing menu.
Rotate: This rotates your photo clockwise by 90 degrees; to rotate in the other direction, click it three times.
Delete: If you spot a blurred photo, click this icon to delete it immediately. No sense keeping it around.
More menu: A click on these three dots brings a new menu, shown in Figure 17-6 earlier. This menu lets you copy or print the photo, set it as your computer’s lock screen, and see details such as the photo’s name, size, date taken, resolution, and similar information.
Zoom: Click these little buttons in the bottom, right corner to zoom in or out of the photo.
To exit the Photos app, click the X in its upper-right corner.
The app clears itself from the screen.
Figure 17-5: The Photos app displays photos stored on your computer as well as on OneDrive.
Figure 17-6: Click any of these places to do different tasks while viewing a photo.
Viewing photo albums
Everybody likes to take pictures, but only a meticulous few like to spend a few hours organizing them, weeding out the bad ones, and sorting them into easily accessible folders.
That’s where the Photo app’s Albums mode comes in handy. It turns its robotic eye on all of your photos, weeds out the duplicates, finds a splashy one for the cover, and names it by the date of the photo session.
To view the Photo app’s albums, follow these steps:
From the Start menu, click the Photos tile.
The Photos app quickly appears, shown earlier in Figure 17-5, to show its Collection mode: a string of photos sorted by the order you shot them.
From the Photo app’s left menu, choose Albums.
The Photos app sorts your photos into albums that represent the best of your session and displays them, shown in Figure 17-7.
From here, you can do several things:
- Click the Camera Roll tile: Click the Camera Roll session to view photos taken from your smartphone and automatically uploaded to OneDrive. The app doesn’t weed out the duplicates, but it’s a quick way to see how your life appears when seen through the lens of your smartphone.
- Click a dated tile: The app sorts each collection of photos by date. Click a date, and the Photos app shows you the best of that day’s photos, shown in Figure 17-7.
Click any photo to view it.
The Photos app fills the screen with the photo; to see more, click the Next or Previous arrows along the photos left and right edges.
Figure 17-7: Click Albums to see your photos sorted by session.
Figure 17-8: Click a date to see your best photos from that session.
The Photo app takes its best guess as to which photos work best for each session. Taking mercy on the vacation-photo-saturated relatives sitting on your couch, the app leaves out a lot of your photos. That’s usually a good thing, as it’s smart enough to remove duplicates and blurry photos.
But if you want to change which photos should be included, scroll to the bottom of the app’s list of photos, shown in Figure 17-8. Then click the Add or Remove Photos button. There, you find checkboxes next to all the photos, so you can pick and choose what should be included.
Viewing Photos from the Desktop with Windows Photo Viewer
The Photos app lets you view your photos quickly and easily, but some people prefer the faithful ol’ Windows Photo Viewer, a Windows staple since 1997. Unfortunately, Microsoft hid it: It’s not listed on the Start menu.
To view photos with the desktop’s age-old Windows Picture Viewer, follow these steps:
Click the Start button to open the Start menu and then click the File Explorer link near the menu’s top-left corner.
The File Explorer program appears.
Click or double-click the words This PC in the File Explorer’s left pane until its list of locations drops down. Then click the word Pictures.
The Pictures folder appears, which usually holds all of your digital photos.
- Open the folder containing the photos you’d like to view. Then right-click your desired photo, choose Open With from the pop-up menu, and choose Windows Photo Viewer from the list of available programs.
Windows Photo Viewer appears, as shown in Figure 17-9, displaying your photo front and center.
Figure 17-9: The desktop’s photo viewer offers more control than the Photos app.
Browsing your photos from the desktop’s Pictures folder
Your Pictures folder, found on the strip hugging the left edge of every desktop folder, easily earns kudos as the best place in Windows to store your digital photos. When Windows imports your digital camera’s photos, it automatically stuffs them there to take advantage of that folder’s built-in viewing tools.
To peek inside any folder — including one in your Pictures folder — double-click that folder’s icon, and the folder’s contents appear, shown in Figure 17-10.
Figure 17-10: The bottom edge of the Windows Photo Viewer offers controls for viewing your photos.
The Ribbon’s View tab works best when you’re viewing or organizing photos. Click the tab and then hover your mouse pointer over each option, from Extra Large Icons to Details. As you hover, the photos quickly cycle through the changes, letting you see how choice changes the view.
The Pictures folder’s Sort By option, shown in Figure 17-8, offers oodles of ways to sort quickly through thousands of photos by clicking different words, dates, and tags listed on the Sort By drop-down list.
Right-click any photo and choose Preview to see a larger view in Photo Viewer. You can return to the Pictures folder by closing Photo Viewer with a click on the red X in Photo Viewer’s upper-right corner.
The options in the Sort By drop-down list let you sort your photos in a variety of ways, including these popular options:
- Date taken: Handy for viewing photos in a timeline, this option sorts them by the order you snapped them. This option works best when you’re viewing large groups of photos in a single folder.
- Tags: If you’ve added tags — descriptive words — to your photos when importing them from your camera, you can find misplaced photos more easily by sorting them by their tags.
- Date: This option sorts the photos by the day you added them to your computer, a quick way to find photos added this week.
- Dimensions: This option sorts them by physical size, letting you know which ones hog the most disk space. (It’s a handy way to find videos you’ve accidentally taken with your camera.)
By sorting photos in different ways, you can usually ferret out the particular shot you’re seeking. The following tips also increase your chances of locating a particular photo:
- Spot a blurred or ugly photo? Right-click it and choose Delete. Taking out the garbage with the Delete option makes the good photos easier to find.
- Remember those tags you entered when importing your photos from your camera? Type any photo’s tag into the Pictures folder’s Search box, located in its top-right corner, and Windows quickly displays photos assigned with that particular tag.
- Want to cover your entire desktop with a photo? Right-click the picture and choose Set As Background. Windows immediately splashes that photo across your desktop.
- Hover your mouse pointer over any photo to see the date it was taken, its rating, size, and dimensions.
Viewing a slide show
Windows offers a simple slide show that displays one photo after another. It’s not fancy, but it’s a built-in way to show photos to friends crowding around your computer screen. Start the photos flowing across the screen in either of these two ways:
When in your Pictures folder, click the Manage tab and then click the Slide Show icon (shown in the margin) from along the folder’s top.- When viewing a photo in the Photo app, click the Slide Show button from the row of six buttons along the photo’s top edge.
When viewing a single photo in Windows Photo Viewer, click the large, round Play Slide Show button (shown in the margin) from along the folder’s bottom center.
Windows immediately darkens the screen, fills the screen with the first picture, and then cycles through each picture in the folder.
Here are more tips for successful on-the-fly slide shows:
- Before starting the slide show, rotate any sideways pictures, if necessary, so that they all appear right-side up: Right-click the problem photo and choose Rotate Right (Clockwise) or Rotate Left (Counterclockwise).
- The slide show includes only photos in your current folder. It doesn’t dip into folders inside that folder and show their photos, too.
- Select just a few of a folder’s pictures and click the Slide Show button to limit the show to just those pictures. (Hold down Ctrl while clicking pictures to select more than one.)
- Feel free to add music to your slide show by playing a song in Media Player, described in Chapter 16, before starting your show. Or, if you picked up a Hawaiian CD while vacationing on the islands, insert that in your CD player to play a soundtrack during your vacation slide show.
Copying digital photos to a CD or DVD
Your photos will be backed up automatically after you set up the Windows File History backup program, covered in Chapter 13. But if you just want to copy some photos to a CD or DVD, perhaps to share with others, stick around.
Head to the computer or office-supply store and pick up a stack of blank CDs or DVDs. Most newer computers can handle any type of blank CD or DVD except for Blu-ray discs.
Then follow these steps to copy files in your Pictures folder to a blank CD or DVD:
Open your Pictures folder from the desktop, select your desired photos, click the Share tab from the Ribbon along the top, and click the Burn to Disc icon.
Select the photos and folders you want to copy by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking their icons. Or, to select them all, hold down Ctrl and press the letter A. When you click the Burn to Disc icon, Windows asks you to insert a blank disc into your drive.
Insert a blank CD or DVD into your writable disc drive’s tray and push the tray shut.
If you’re copying a lot of files, insert a DVD into your DVD burner because DVDs can store five times as much information as a CD. If you’re giving away a few photos to a friend, insert a blank CD instead because blank CDs cost less.Decide how you want to use the disc.
Windows offers two options for creating the disc:
- Like a USB Flash Drive: Select this option when you intend for other computers to read the disc. Windows treats the disc much like a folder, letting you copy additional photos to the disc later. It’s a good choice when you’re backing up only a few pictures because you can add more to the disc later.
- With a CD/DVD Player: Select this option to create discs that play on CD and DVD players attached to TVs. After you write to the disc, it’s sealed off so you can’t write to it again.
Type a short title for your backup disc and click Next.
Type something short but descriptive. When you click Next, Windows begins backing up all of that folder’s photos to the disc.
Click the Burn or Burn to Disc button again if necessary.
If you selected With a CD/DVD Player in Step 3, click Burn to Disc to start copying your photos to the disc.
If you didn’t select any photos or folders in Step 1, Windows opens an empty window showing the newly inserted disc’s contents: nothing. Drag and drop the photos you want to burn into that window.
Don’t have enough space on the CD or DVD to hold all your files? Unfortunately, Windows isn’t smart enough to tell you when to insert the second disc. Instead, it whines about not having enough room and doesn’t burn any discs. Try burning fewer files, adding more until you fill up the disc.