When importing pictures from your camera you have many useful options with Windows Live Photo Gallery. After plugging in your camera to a USB port and turning it on, you get the AutoPlay dialog, one of the options is:

Using this option makes your picture management really easy. The next dialog looks something like this:

Do accept the default option to review and organize your pictures, just click Next.

Now comes the nice part, the next window looks a bit like this:

There may be several groups listed. They are grouped by the time the pictures were taken. You might have pictures taken at different occasions and there may be some time elapsed between these occasions. The import program looks for major gaps between picture groups. Note in the illustration here the photos are grouped by the three different days on which they were taken.

You have control over the grouping. Note the “Adjust groups:” control at the lower right. This allows you to adjust the time interval between groups from a half hour to just one group.

The settings can be made in half hour intervals from 0.5 to 6 hours, then in 1 hour increments up to 24 hours, next in day increments to 30 days, with the final setting being “All items in one group”. So you can set it to group the pictures in the most appropriate way.

For this illustration I have set 2 hours between groups and that resulted in four groups.

Now when you click on “Enter a name” a text entry box allows you to enter a folder name for that group of photos.

There are many other options.

Note the the check boxes in front of the groups. If you un-check one, that group will not be imported. Also note the “View all … items”. It shows how many photos there are in that group. Click on that command and you will see thumbnails of all the pictures in that group. Each one has a checked box and you can un-check any photo that you don’t wish to import.

You can assign tags to the groups and define “More options” – but let’s leave those for another blog.

Click Import and the folders will be created and the photos copied from your camera into those folders. During this operation you will see a dialog similar to this:

The “Erase after importing” box is not checked by default. If you want to clear the photos from your camera, check this box. Here I checked it. Then after the photos are copied the erase operation will be performed:

After the import chore is completed Windows Live Photo Gallery opens.

Now there are many more things you can accomplish to organize, enhance and share your pictures. In another blog I will have some more suggestions, in fact I have a full book full – but that is still another blog.