Ok, a rather long name for a product, but it comes bundled with the Vista operating system. As I don't have Vista myself, a collegue provided me with the software and made a demo of the product.

If Windows Photo Gallery does provide some support for RAW pictures, it failed however to recognize / import my RAW pictures. It seems that the now defunct Minolta body is not supported. Clearly a show-stopper, at least for me.

Except this annoyance however, Windows Photo Gallery is a very descent picture manager and compare very favorably with the previous software that I have reviewed (namely Picasa, F-Spot, Digikam). With Windows Photo Gallery you will be able to tag (multiple level supported here) pictures. You will be able to filter according to multiple tags if you go through the search tool (search for tag1, tag2, etc.) Not tremendous but it does the job. One very good point is that the tags are stored within the picture following the standards and can be retrieved from an other picture manager (such as Digikam)

Windows Photo Gallery does the basic editing tricks (color, exposure, sharpness, crop, auto) that you will find everywhere. One very good point, was the ability to "undo" the changes on a saved picture within a single click. However, I don't know if the software reverse its action and re-save, or simply past the original picture that it has stored somewhere in the system before we began editing the picture. My guess is that it reverse its action and re-save and as jpeg is a destructive format, doing this too many times would probably result in loss of some details.

As a conclusion, we have yet an other tool for the "entry level market". It performs well and will fit most needs. Tagging has been well thought of and intuitiveness is there. I'm not sure how it would work for very large collection, but for someone with advanced needs, the editing section will probably be the first true gap.