Organizing and Editing Your Pictures

Windows 7 does a good job of organizing small collections of photos, but if you have a larger collection, a third-party program might do a better job. You'll also need to use a third-party program to edit your photos when they need editing; that capability is not built into the Windows operating system.

Note Windows 7 does include the Paint utility, which is significantly revamped in this version. But Paint is a rudimentary editor at best, not a program I can recommend for even occasional photo editing.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft included the Windows Photo Gallery application for both organizing and editing digital photos. That app isn't bundled with Windows 7, although you can download the latest version, Windows Live Photo Gallery, for free from download.live.com. It's a good basic editing program, and the price is definitely right.

If your needs exceed Photo Gallery's capabilities, you should probably investigate a more fully featured photo editing program, such as one of the following:

• Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com), $99.99
• Paint Shop Pro Photo (www.corel.com), $99.99
• Picasa (www.picasa.com), free
• Ulead PhotoImpact (www.ulead.com), $69.99

These are relatively low-cost programs, good for casual and hobbyist photographers. For more serious and professional photographers, there's always Adobe Photoshop CS4 (www.adobe.com), which runs $699 but offers very advanced editing capabilities.

Whichever program you choose, you'll probably want to configure Windows' default programs so that this program opens when you doubleclick a photo file on your hard drive.