Vista - Photo Gallery & My Pictures

I understand that Windows Picture Gallery is essentially an organizer and
picture viewer. Why don't recent photos imported into Picture Gallery ALSO
appear in Pictures (My Pictures)? Photos which were were transferred from My
Pictures on my old computer to Pictures on my new computer appear on Photo
Gallery when I click on All Photos but any new pictures appear in Photo
Gallery but not in Pictures (My Pictures). Can any one explain this?

Handyman
--
Handyman

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 12:20:03 -0700, Handyman
<Handyman@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I understand that Windows Picture Gallery is essentially an organizer and
>picture viewer. Why don't recent photos imported into Picture Gallery ALSO
>appear in Pictures (My Pictures)? Photos which were were transferred from My
>Pictures on my old computer to Pictures on my new computer appear on Photo
>Gallery when I click on All Photos but any new pictures appear in Photo
>Gallery but not in Pictures (My Pictures). Can any one explain this?
>
>Handyman

I think Microsoft misnamed Photo Galley since the name implies it is
some gallery or collection of photos. It is no such thing. The actual
file structure in Vista hasn't changed from prior versions of Windows.
Files are still located in folders. What you see in Photo Gallery or
don't see depends which folders you tell it to include. In other words
there isn't any special folders where Photo Gallery stores anything,
it simply can build a list of folders to display. This confusion is
further compounded since Photo Galley is the default picture viewer
which actives anytime you double click on a image file in Windows
Explorer. The difference being when you do that you are limited to
viewing photos in whatever folder Windows Explorer happens to be in at
the moment. Then add in junction points that may link to phantom
folders that don't really exist but are there to assist older
applications and it can be a bit confusing to find where your photos
actually are.

My advise, and I have over a million graphic files; movies, still
images, clip art, etc., is totally ignore Vista's special folders and
replace it with your own design scheme. That should make it easier to
keep track of where you photos actually are.

For example here is how I do it:

I set up a folder I called raw. EVEYTHING new, regardless of origin
begins here. All the stuff I download off the web, stuff people send
me as an email attachment, photos I take, videos I shoot, the works.
This folder has several sub folder to help me kept track of various
categories.

From time to time I scan the contents before it gets to be too
unmanageable and delete stuff I know I'll never use. What remains gets
moved to a folder I call hold. This is stuff I may still discard at
some point, but I haven't decided yet. This folder is broken up still
more into various sub categories. But I know it's still raw files I
haven't done any work on yet.

Stuff I have finished I move to an external drive. On it there are
several master folders I named archives, one for video, another for
still images slideshows and so on. Within each are a very detailed
series of sub folders arranged by categories.

So it looks something like this:

still images--
vacations--
Arizona--
sunsets

Doing it this way you can take advantage of Vista's better file search
routines or use combinations of Windows Explorer or Photo Galley to
quick see what you have.