Microsoft Windows photo editor

Windows Vista had a version of the Microsoft Windows photo viewer (I think it was called Photo Gallery, not sure) that was useful. It was the default viewer, and I could click through pictures downloaded from my camera, and if I wanted I could do light editing, i.e., adjust contrast, brightness, color saturation etc. from within the viewer.

I skipped Windows 7, went to Windows 8, and the default photo viewer is pretty much useless. About all I can do is click through and look at the pictures. No more editing capability. I don't know if they did this in Windows 7, or waited until Windows 8 to ruin the program.

I used to be able to tweak a picture and move on to the next one in less time than it takes me now to even start up any standalone image editor that I have, much less find and open the file with the editor, dig through the menus to find the tool I want, perform the edit, save the file, and go back to the useless photo viewer.

What is my option to recover the former usefulness of quickly clicking through a batch of photos and doing light editing on some of them without having to call up a separate editing program each time I want to brighten an image or increase the contrast?

tanstaafl.

Microsoft shifted the quick edit options out of "Classic" Windows on the desktop, and into the "Modern" Windows side:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/editing-photos

With the next free update to Windows 8.1, (Tentatively called Update 2), it will be easier to run the Modern apps on the Classic desktop alongside other classic apps. For now, workarounds exist to launch them easier without going into the full Modern interface: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/modern-apps-windows-81-desktop/

There is a photo gallery/editing program that's part of Windows Live Essentials. You can give that a try since, as a licensed Windows user, it's a free download.

Thanks, Andy. I was all prepared to post a rant about how useless, cluttered, and over-simplified the Windows Live Photo Gallery program was when I accidentally clicked on the "Fine Tune" button, and there popped up over on the right side of the window the familiar manual adjustments, with even a few improvements -- the histogram, and the ability to have all of the adjustment sliders on-screen at once. And, I reluctantly admit that the automated tool that lets me choose one of nine combined highlight-brightness-shadow presets simultaneously works pretty well.

Navigation is troubling. There does not appear to be a way to browse the full directory structure without adding specific subdirectories to the "Photo Library". That just doesn't match up with the way I have my pictures organized. Yeah, I'm old-school and everything in my computer is organized by drive letter, directory, subdirectory (and many sub-sub directories!) and filename, with all directories named clearly and logically to make navigation obvious.

It'll take a bit of adjustment ("It's different from what I'm used to so it can't be any good…") but it is a big improvement over what I was dealing with before.

Thank you again.

tanstaafl.

You're welcome, Raúl.