Windows Essentials 2012 – the Bell Tools For Thee

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Essentials Suite will reach end of support on January 10, 2017.

Not really a surprise, the software suite has had no upgrades at all over the past four years. Still, it will be sad to bid goodbye to Windows Live Mail and Photo Gallery (two of the applications in the suite). They both have more functionality in their little fingers than Microsoft’s Mail and Photos apps have ever had in their whole stunted bodies.

The Photos app, in particular, is a miserable thing that still does not offer support for managing descriptive, people and geo tags, or face recognition, even four years after its introduction.

Microsoft has failed to deliver yet again.

October 19, 2016

Categories:

Computers and Internet, Photography

12 responses to “Windows Essentials 2012 – the Bell Tools For Thee”

José

October 20, 2016

Sad to see Windows Photo Gallery go. I have been testing various apps to act as a replacement (Photo Supreme, Digikam, ACDSee). When the Photos app was debuted on an Insider Build I was excited on what I thought was to be a Photo Gallery replacement (https://jmoliver.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/envisioning-a-cool-windows-10-photo-app/) but it has been a while and there have been no significant updates. Recently, there is some recent news of an updated Photos App – http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-photo-app-updated-with-additional-editing-features-for-fast-ring-insiders-on-pc

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1. Geoff Coupe
  
  October 21, 2016
  
  Hi José – I’m afraid that the updates to the Photos app amount to little more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. A few extra colour filters, and the ability to doodle on your photos with a pen. Well, colour me totally unimpressed…
  
  Reply
Ludwig

October 30, 2016

Microsoft has lost its way, which was a drunk meander at best. There are probably no programmers left there, just script kiddies who have never known any users. Sad, sad, sad …

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vanroaming

November 12, 2016

Whilst WLPG still works the Windows 10 update has caused the display to break up intermittently when I go into the large photo display mode (on my 2015 Dell laptop with latest display driver). I recently asked on the dpreview forum for suggestions on replacement programs. The only suggestion was IMatch which looks powerful and professional (and well supported by its developer) but has quite a steep learning curve and is probably more complicated than I need. All I use WLPG for is tagging, rating and captioning photos and using this metadata to make selections. I enjoy its slickness and the ease of tagging … even with ~160,000 photos it pops up tagging suggestions instantly as I type. Despite its power it looks as if IMatch will be both slower and more fiddly to use for my purposes. Do you have any experience with IMatch? If so, would you think it would be a suitable replacement? Are there others I should consider?

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1. Geoff Coupe
  
  November 12, 2016
  
  Sorry, no experience at all with IMatch. I’ve been using Photo Supreme for some time now, and still find it the best DAM program for my needs. It’s relatively straightforward to use, but has enormous depth and flexibility if required. Well supported by the (small) development team, and with an active forum of users.
  
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  1. vanroaming
    
    November 13, 2016
    
    Thanks for the recommendation (and thanks also for your contributions to forum discussions on this subject that I’m now reading). I’ll give Photo Supreme a go.
    
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TomT

January 13, 2017

Please excuse a very random if tangentially related question, but I have a colleague with a problem and I suspect you may know of a solution. She has a large collection of images stored on Windows computer. These images have extensive notes stored in their “Comments” metadata property, viewable through File Explorer. We are trying to find an image editing program that will allow her to view and edit these comments (including batch editing) more easily than doing so through Windows own native File Explorer. And here’s the kicker: she needs to do so on a Windows XP machine. Do you happen to know of any software that fits the bill? Many thanks!

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1. Geoff Coupe
  
  January 14, 2017
  
  Hi TomT – I think that Geosetter will do the trick. It handles batch editing of image metadata, and it runs on Windows XP.
  
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  1. TomT
    
    January 18, 2017
    
    Thanks very much for the suggestion! After perusing Geosetter I am not sure it will work for this particular purpose, as it doesn’t seem to recognize Windows 10 metadata fields such as “Comments.” (Why the people working with my colleague chose to use Windows 10 metadata fields to store such information, I don’t know.) I may however suggest she use Geosetter and start over, transferring the data from the Windows 10 “Comments” field into a similar EXIF metadata field. In any case, I appreciate your help!
    
    Reply
    1. Geoff Coupe
      
      January 18, 2017
      
      Yes – sorry about that. It looks as though the Microsoft Comments field is something proprietary to Microsoft (why am I not surprised?) and has been there since the days of XP, if not earlier. Doubtless it’s still in Windows 10 for legacy and backward compatibility reasons. Most of the other fields have now been switched across to XMP de facto standards, but not this one.
      
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    2. Geoff Coupe
      
      January 18, 2017
      
      Here’s a thread that seems to confirm what I thought – the comments field is unique to Microsoft: http://www.sevenforums.com/music-pictures-video/82642-how-search-jpg-metadata-specifically-comments.html
      
      Mind you, it does say that Phil Harvey’s Exiftool can deal with them. The only problem is that the tool is command-line driven, which makes it problematic for mere mortals to use.
      
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      1. TomT
        
        January 18, 2017
        
        That’s very helpful! Unfortunately my colleague’s colleagues initially decided to place comments in the Microsoft Comments field, I suspect merely because that field was there in File Explorer. Now that they want my colleague to be able to easily edit those comments, that location has become a problem. I think they will all be best served by biting the bullet and moving the comments to a more generally supported field.
        
        Reply