Chapter 18: Working with Graphics

Viewing Images on Your Computer

Windows gives you two ways to view images: inside Explorer windows and using the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer.

Viewing Images in an Explorer Window

It is typically very hard to identify an image file by its name, especially if the name was assigned to the file automatically by a digital camera or scanner. Even if you rename the files yourself, the name seldom captures enough information to uniquely identify a single photo from, say, your Hawaiian vacation. For this reason, Explorer windows have two views that are much more convenient for examining folders of image files: Thumbnails view and Filmstrip view. Either can be selected from the View menu of an Explorer window.

Thumbnails view resembles the Tiles or Icons view, except that the icon that represents an image file is a small version of the image itself. These small images are themselves called thumbnails, which is how the view gets its name. Folders that contain images are represented by a folder icon surrounding four (or fewer) images from the folder, like this:

Filmstrip view is the default choice for the My Pictures folder. As the name suggests, this view arranges the files in a folder as if they were a filmstrip. As shown in Figure 18-1, thumbnail images of the folder's files appear in a linear order at the bottom of the screen, and the selected file is displayed in a larger window above. The two blue buttons below the selected image move the display forward and backward through the filmstrip. The other two buttons rotate the currently selected image 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.

Figure 18-1: Filmstrip view is convenient for reviewing a folder of pictures.

If you want to use an image as your desktop background, right-click its icon in an Explorer window and select Set As Desktop Background.

Looking at Images with the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer

Unless you have installed other graphics applications that have claimed image file types as their own, Windows opens image files using the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer, shown in Figure 18-2. The image resembles what you would see in the Filmstrip view in an Explorer window, but is larger and inside its own window. You also have a few more toolbar buttons to work with.

Picture And Fax Viewer can open files in a large number of formats: bitmap (.bmp), tagged image file or TIFF (.tif), JPEG (.jpg), GIF (.gif), Fax (.awd), PCX (.pcx), DCX (.dcx), XIF (.xif), and WIFF (.wif).

Figure 18-2: The Windows Picture And Fax Viewer

Changing What You See

Windows Picture And Fax Viewer gives you several tools to help you examine an image.

• The Zoom In and Zoom Out tools (represented on the toolbar by magnifying glasses) adjust the magnification of the image. To use one of these tools, click its tool button. The cursor changes into a magnifying glass. Click in the image. The Zoom Out tool decreases the magnification of the image, while the Zoom In tool increases magnification and re-centers the image at the point where you clicked.
• The Best Fit tool (represented by a rectangle with arrows pointing outward from its corners) adjusts the size of the image to the size of the window. The image is made as large as possible within the bounds of the window. Adjusting the size of the window automatically adjusts the size of the image.
• The Actual Size tool (represented by a rectangle with arrows pointing inward to its sides) makes each pixel of the image equal a pixel on your monitor. This gives you the most accurate view of the image file. If the whole image does not fit within the window, scrollbars appear at the side of the window.
• The Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Counterclockwise tools are the most difficult icons to interpret. They are represented by a pair of triangles with a clockwise or counterclockwise arrow above them. Clicking either tool button rotates the image 90 degrees. To turn an image upside down, click either button twice. Unlike the Zoom and Size tools, the rotation tools change the image itself, not just your view of it. If you rotate an image and then save the file, the image will be rotated the next time you open the file.

Watching a Slide Show

The best way to view series of photos is to put them all into the same folder, open one with Windows Picture And Fax Viewer, and then click the Start Slide Show button, which resembles a small movie screen. The entire monitor is used to display the image. Click the left mouse button to move to the next image, or wait for the viewer to display the next "slide" automatically. Return to the view shown in Figure 18-2 by pressing the ESCAPE key.

The right and left arrow buttons in Figure 18-2 move you forward and backward through the image files in the same folder as the one you are displaying, just as the similar buttons do in Filmstrip view in Windows Explorer.

File Operations

The toolbar contains Delete, Print, Copy To, and Edit buttons. Delete sends the file to the Recycle Bin. Print starts the Photo Printing Wizard; Copy To opens a dialog box that lets you pick a folder to copy the file into; and Edit opens the default graphics editing application, which may be Microsoft Paint.

You can use the Copy To tool to convert an image file to a different file type, for example to change a BMP file to TIFF or vice versa. Click the Copy To icon on the toolbar (it's a picture of a floppy disk) to display the Copy To dialog box. Change the Save As Type setting to the file format you want.