For many families, one of the primary reasons to have a PC is to manage and organize their collection of digital "memories" -- that is, digital photos and home video clips. Windows Vista provides several tools for working with your family's unique digital content.

Scanning Photos with Windows Fax and Scan

If you have photos that aren't in digital format yet, such as photos you took with a film camera, you might want to digitize them (that is, convert them to digital format) using a scanner. A scanner is like a copier; it has a glass bed on which you place the photo you want scanned. You issue a command in the operating system to tell the scanner to scan the glass's content, and then save it to a digital file on your hard disk.

Most scanners come with their own proprietary interface software; however, you might prefer to use Windows Vista's scanning application -- Windows Fax and Scan. To run it, select Start > All Programs > Windows Fax and Scan. In the Windows Fax and Scan window, you can click New Scan to scan a photo from any supported scanner connected to your PC.

Importing Photos from a Digital Camera

When you connect a digital camera to your Windows Vista PC, the AutoPlay dialog box opens. From here you can choose to do the following:

• Import pictures using Windows: This copies the pictures to your Pictures folder automatically and displays them in the Windows Photo Gallery application, as in Figure 4-6. The imported pictures are stored in your Pictures folder, in a subfolder named with today's date and an optional tag (which you're prompted to enter).

Figure 4-6: Windows Photo Gallery shows the imported pictures.

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• View pictures using Windows: This opens the first picture -- or the currently selected picture -- in Windows Photo Gallery and displays it individually, as shown in Figure 4-7. You can click Import to Gallery for that picture, or you can click the Next button (the right-pointing arrow) to move to the next picture without importing.

Figure 4-7: Each picture appears individually in Windows Photo Gallery.

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• View pictures using Windows Media Center: This opens the pictures in Windows Media Center, which was covered previously in this lesson.

The next section provides details for creating your own movies. Read on.