Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• Flickr:Yahoo’s popular photo-sharing service provides users with a Photostream, which is basically just every photo you’ve ever uploaded. But it also provides folder-like containers, including sets, which can be further grouped into collections. So you might consider these folders and sub-folders, respectively. Looking at the Flickr view in Photos, you’ll see a tile for your Photostream and then tiles for each collection and set.

• Connected PCs:As with your own Picture library, your connected PCs will present an aggregated list of folders, sorted alphabetically.

Each of the supported photo sources provides nearly identical features related to viewing photos and photo slideshows. So you can browse into any source, and eventually you’ll be presented with one or more actual photos, in a folder. At this point, you can perform some basic activities related to individual photos or groups of photos.

To view a photo full-screen, simply select it. This works exactly as expected, but if you open the app bar (Winkey + Z) while viewing an individual photo, you’ll see some interesting options, as shown in Figure 9-9.

These options include the following:

• Set as … Lock screen:While you can always use the PC Settings interface to select a favorite photo for your lock screen image, oftentimes you’ll think to do this while actually viewing photos. This menu item, found by tapping the Set as button, lets you do so.

• Set as … App tile:By default, the Photos app tile will shuffle through photos, presenting an animated view. But you can configure a single picture to be the permanent tile image if you’d like.

• Set as … App background:As you’ve seen, the Photos app provides a nice photographic background image in its main view. But you’ll probably want to change that to a favorite photo of your own. When you do, this view will change to resemble Figure 9-10.

that this delete button is not available when viewing photos on connected online services or PCs.

• Delete:This button deletes the file from your PC, after a quick confirmation.

• Slide show:This button triggers a slideshow of the photos contained in the folder that contains the picture you’re currently viewing.

Figure 9-9:A single photo viewed full-screen

Figure 9-10:Customizing the Photos app with your own picture.

Of course, you can also trigger slideshows from a folder view, and when you access the app bar from this view, you get a different set of buttons, and thus capabilities. A few are notable.

In this Browse by Date view, you can also reverse pinch to zoom out and see more on-screen at once.

The first is a Browse by date button, though it only appears in the Pictures library view. When you activate this button, the view switches so that each “folder” tile now represents a month, as in Figure 9-11. (And there’s now a new Browse by album button in the app bar so you can switch back.)

Figure 9-11:The Pictures library, viewed by date

This is a neat feature, but it works only within a single source. You can’t mix photos from, say, Facebook and Flickr into a single slideshow. You’ll be prompted to that effect if you try.

There’s also a power-user feature of sorts that lets you collect photos from different folders (within a single photo source) into a basket, like that in the Metro-style File Picker, so that you can run a slideshow of photos from different locations.

To use this feature, enter a folder or view that contains photos. Then, select individual photos, as you would when selecting Start screen tiles: by right-clicking them, tapping and dragging down a bit, or by pressing the Spacebar; as you select a photo, a selection rectangle will indicate success. Or you can select every photo in a folder by opening the app bar and pressing Select All.

Either way, as you select photos, you’ll see two new buttons in the app bar as you go: a Clear Selection button for clearing the selection and a selection thumbnail that indicates how many photos you’ve selected; these can both be seen in Figure 9-12. Once you’ve selected all the photos you want—again, from multiple folders—you can tap the Slide show button to start this more advanced slideshow type.

Many common photo-related activities work consistently with similar features in other Metro apps, thanks to the new system-wide capabilities in Windows 8. For example, when viewing a photo, you can print it by accessing the Devices interface (Winkey + K) or, more directly, the Print interface (Ctrl + P). Or you can use the Share interface (Winkey + H) to share the photo with others using a compatible Metro-style app, such as Mail.

Figure 9-12:Multi-selecting photos from different folders.

There’s no way to search all sources simultaneously, though that would be very useful.

Likewise, the excellent Search functionality in Windows 8 can be used in Photos to find particular pictures. If you access the Search charm (Winkey + Q) while viewing a photo or from within a particular folder, the Search pane that appears will search only that folder. Search at the source level and it will search just that source.

If you open the Search charm from outside the Photos app and then select Photos from the list of apps in the Search pane, you get a grid-based view of your Pictures library, filtered to the search term, as shown in Figure 9-13.

Figure 9-13:A Photos search results list

If you’ve ever connected a digital camera, a camera’s memory card, or another device (like a smartphone) that contains pictures to Windows in the past, you know that Microsoft’s desktop OS has long supported basic photo acquisition (or what some people think of “downloading”) capabilities through desktop apps like Photo Gallery. You can still do this, if you’d like. Or, you can use the new Metro-based photo acquisition interface that’s available through the Photos app.

When you plug in a compatible device that contains photos, you’ll see a Metro-style notification flyover, or “toast,” like that shown in Figure 9-14.

Figure 9-14:Windows 8 asks what you’d like to do when you plug in this sort of device.

If you select this notification, you’ll see a window similar to that in Figure 9-15; like the notification, this display can appear anywhere in Windows, including Photos or other Metro-style apps, the Start screen, or the Windows desktop.