How to make Vista Photo Gallery ONLY preview images?

[tpg0007]

Some questions are just so particular that it's really hard to google for an answer.

If you keep videos and images together, such as film covers, when you open an image in Photo Gallery/the default image preview, and scroll through them by arrowing left and right or whatever, the preview window will attempt to open video files too, slowing browsing tremendously. Is there any way to stop this behavior? Make the preview window only open images when you scroll through.

 

[Maximilian]

I wanna know this as well.

 

[Griffinhart]

Ok, it took me a minute to realize what you meant, but I do have a suggestion.

There doesn't seem to be a way to prevent it from viewing movie files when in slideshow mode like that, but you can sort them in the gallery. Use the little drop down box near the search bar to change the "Group By" option to file type. That way you'll get all images one after the other instead of a mix of video and images. Also, you can add tags to the media.

After changing it to group by file type, select all your Video files and right click on them. Select "add tags" and create a tag called "video" or something similar. Then select all your image files and create tags for all of them called "image." Now you can use the left pane in photo gallery to view files with specific tags. Just select the tag labeled "image" and you can use the preview feature to only view things tagged with that label.

I've gotten into using tags on my photos and videos pretty heavily. Not only does it make it easier to browse though them, adding the metadata to these files makes them much easier to search through.

Consider downloading and using Windows Live Photo Gallery as well. It is really just an upgrade to the included photo viewer in Vista, but IMHO it works much better and is a little easier to use. It can also publish photos to Flickr and adds your tags automatically.

 

[tpg0007]

Thanks for the suggestion. While sorting by type is an obvious workaround, it's not optimal. To generalize, if a certain dataset has files of different types, one of them being image, and another being video, and you name the different files of the dataset with the same name so different datasets would appear alphabetically, with the image files being the at-a-glance index, it would be so much better if the preview function would go down the list of datasets alphabetically and only display images. I bet there's a registry key somewhere, we just don't know what it is.