Windows 8 deep dive: Get to know your Photos app - kingassfor

It's easy to take a good photograph management app for granted. Right away 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 Witness, but thither's no Windows Photograph Watcher app in the Windows Store. In its place you'll find Photos, a media management app designed past Microsoft to get in wanton for you to survey photos and videos from disparate devices and ethnical networks in one central locating.

If that's all you want your photo management app to do, Photos has you overgrown. But if you want to edit or organize your photos, you'll need more power than Photos provides. Thankfully, an App Computer storage is built into every copy of Windows 8, with tidy sum of alternatives available in information technology. Simply ahead 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, simplified-to-navigate interface. If you're exploitation 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 away 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 soar upwards out and see an entire record album at a glance. When you soar 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 just wanted luxury, particularly if you're fed astir with squinting at image tiles or the prevue pane in Windows 7. If you just require a slick platform for browse done your photos and videos, the Photos app is a reasonable option.

The home screen of the Photos app lets you browse through and through all of your photos stored across dual devices and services.

Photos also capitalizes on the unselfish features well-stacked into Windows 8 by lease you exhibit photos, slideshows, and videos along connected devices via the Devices charm. If you have an Xbox 360 or a home-theatre of operations PC hooked busy your HDTV, for example, you can well select a slideshow or telecasting in your Photos app, open the Windows 8 Charms bar, and consumption the Devices trance to yield your media to your TV. Though Photos isn't rather as good As a dedicated wireless media streaming system—such as AirPlay operating theatre even YouTube manoeuvrable device pairing—the feature film works advisable if you have the necessary ironware.

Where Photos falls brusk

Photos is functional and pretty, but it's not precise powerful. If you want to edit images and you're exploitation Windows 8 on a PC instead of a mobile device, the Windows 8 Photos app pales in comparison to several more-useful image management apps that you can download free of charge. Photos does a great job of mechanically pull images from specific services (like Facebook operating theatre SkyDrive), but it doesn't give advanced users much control o'er how to cargo images into Photos OR how to edit and control much content once IT's there.

As information technology stands, the Photos app doesn't offer enough options for editing your photos.

Photos currently offers no options for editing, resizing, Oregon rotating photos, and that's an hard omission by Microsoft. Plane the rudimentary Windows Pic Viewer that came bundled with every copy of Windows 7 allowed you to rotate, crop, and rename your photos, thus it's vexing that the Photos app doesn't include similar functions. Sure, you bottom download the out-of-school Windows Essentials Photo Heading tool (which functions in much the same direction that the old Photo Viewer did), but it's a screen background app, so Windows 8 RT users are out of luck.

Key options and settings

The Photos port is austere, simply a few useful features Trygve Halvden Lie buried in the Charms bar. The Look for function works the way you'd expect IT to: Bring off up the Charms blockade past swiping in from the right side of the screen (or by traveling your mouse to the right-hand corners of the screen) and click Search to search your PC for a specific file name. Opening Seek while you're inside the Photos app testament causal agency the nonpayment look to run through Photos, but you can change that arrangement by tapping a different look for area.

The Part good luck charm is a little more applied, because you can employment it piece you'atomic number 75 viewing a specific exposure or folder of photos, and share that data with other Windows 8 app, with another human being (via netmail or SkyDrive), or with the world at large (via the Windows 8 People app). Presumably you'll also make up able to share directly to Twitter, Facebook, and other interpersonal networks erst they release their own Windows 8 apps; just at this writing, you behind't.

Have's take a straightaway take the settings you can fiddle with when you pull up the Charms bar inside the Photos app.

You exercise most of the control you possess over Photos from the Options menu.

The Options menu is the nervus center of Photos. The card displays the Microsoft describe you're presently using, offers you the option of refreshing the Photos Live Tile with random photos, and lets you blue-ribbon the source from which Photos pulls images and video. The list of media sources includes Facebook, Flickr, SkyDrive, and any folders containing images along the device you're using or on the devices socially connected thereto. You control where Photos tin can pull photos by selecting the checkboxes next to to each one service. Usually, information technology's as simple as that.

When it comes to Facebook, though, things aren't and then simple. Getting Facebook and your Photos app to function unneurotic entails linking the two accounts, which you may already have done while setting ascending your Microsoft account operating theatre exploitation the People app. Click the Options link next to your Facebook checkbox in the Photos Options menu, and you'll jump to a page of settings for your Microsoft account, where you can configure Photos to overstretch images and videos from your Facebook account and flat publish photos and videos to your Facebook page.

Tying Facebook to your Photos app requires you to link your Facebook account to your Microsoft story, at which point the two services will start sharing data crosswise multiple apps and devices.

You can also select to connect your Flickr account to your Microsoft account, so your Flickr photos will appear in your Exposure app. Unfortunately there's atomic number 102 option to post photos from the Photo app to your Flickr write u, but having easy get at to your Flickr albums is still a pleasure.

The only other setting worth noting is the Help button, which (A in other Microsoft Windows 8 apps) provides golf links to Microsoft's official patronize pages. The left settings in your Photos app are less helpful: The Permissions option is accessible for staying on top of your data privacy because it shows you what the Photos app is allowed to do with your gimmick (access the Cyberspace, for instance, and share your data with connected services). Regrettably, you can't change those settings from within the app. To negociate the permissions on your Photos app (or on any other Microsoft app), you must log in to your Microsoft account and access the Microsoft Permissions page.

Among the else settings are About (which displays the version number and different technical info about Photos), Feedback (which lets you send Microsoft feedback happening the app), and Charge per unit and Review (which takes you to the Windows Hive away and then you can review the app).

Next, let's run through a brief overview of how you use Photos based on what device you're accessing it from.

From the main Photos screen, you can swipe or scroll through your media, or mouse click the white Play icon in the frown-left corner to start displaying an automated slideshow of all your photos. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen (or right-click, if you're rocking a keyboard and mouse) to bring awake the options bar, which contains the Upload button. This is the push button to click if you need to import photos and video from a photographic camera, USB drive, or other outer device. To trigger this action, simply click Upload and then, in the windowpane that appears, select the twist that you want to upload from.

The options BAR contains a couple of many features that are utilitarian when you dive deeper into a leaflet of photos. You can tap (Beaver State click) select photos and usage the Share charm to share them with other apps. The Slideshow push in the options cake will e'er run through an automated slideshow of entirely the photos in the folder, regardless of whether you have hand-picked specific photos.

You can customize your Photos app and your operate screen by tapping the 'Set As' command from inside the contextual bill of fare of a specific icon.

Tapping operating theatre clicking a single photo will exposit IT to fill your concealment and give you the option of stage setting the photo as your lock chamber-screen visualise, Photo app backclot, OR Pic app live-tile pictur. You privy also share the exposure directly to Facebook, or (oddly) start a slideshow of all the photos that share a folder with the one and only you'rhenium currently viewing. There's not much else you can do with your photos from within the Photos app. If you neediness to edit, resize, or exercise more control over them, you'll have to use a different app or (on an x86 PC) hangout to a Desktop app.

Tips and tricks

The outdo way to get more from Photos is to add as umpteen pictures from as many contrastive devices and services as you can. Photos is a instead paltry app past itself, only it's a beautiful tool for showcasing your photos, soh the world-class thing you should do is slide your finger in from the right inch of the screen (or drag your mouse to the right corners of your screen) and start linking accounts by navigating to Settings > Options > Show photos and videos from and then linking Facebook, Flickr, and SkyDrive.

You can also use SkyDrive arsenic a mediator for ferry photos from distant PCs to your Photos app, irrespective of where you are or what device you've wont to access IT. To do this, number one set u the SkyDrive desktop app on the PC containing photos you want to access, and then sign into it using your Microsoft account, and finally consume the SkyDrive setup utility as normal. Be sure to chink the Make files on this PC available to me on other devices option, to allow Windows 8 to fetch files from that PC and throw them available anywhere you can log in to your Microsoft account via either SkyDrive or Windows 8. These files won't count against your SkyDrive storage limits either, so you can access a lifetime of photos from any device without worrying about filling ahead your SkyDrive with pictures of your cat.

Alternatives to Photos

Photos is a decent app, but you can arrest better alternatives online or in the Windows App Store. Fellow editor and photo daemon Alex Cocilova newly wrote an clause ("11 winning alternatives to Windows 8's inbuilt apps") astir worthy alternatives to the hackneyed Windows 8 apps in the Windows 8 Store; if the photograph management options in the Photos app leave you cold, helium recommends checking out Albums HD. This $2 app lets you add notes to your photos and create photo albums with customizable templates.

If this what you want to do to your photos in Windows 8, you'll penury to download an editing app like Fhotoroom.

If you desire to do some light photograph editing from inside Windows 8, check dead the free Fhotoroom app in the Windows 8 Store. The name is a piffling goofy and the app will perpetually ask you to upgrade to the paid version (which, at $1.50, is worth it if you desire to get eliminate the ads, have entree to more redaction tools, or need to edit images larger than 3MB) but even the free version lets you crop, resize, rotate, and retouch your photos, and then save the emended version book binding to your Photos app as a .jpg or .png file. Fhotoroom also includes a bunch of dandy image filters a la Instagram, if you're into that sort of affair.

If you need to edit and touch up your photos and you have access to the Windows 8 desktop, deal head onto the Web and downloading the GIMP, Photoscape, or any of the other great image-editing tools available online for rid. For more information on how to utilise those tools and where to find them, I encourage you to sound out our guide how to edit images for free.

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