Small Gripe with Vista's Photo Viewer

[sitheris]

Why does the Photo Viewer in Vista no longer smooth (or antialias) a picture when zooming in? In XP, the Picture and Fax viewer did this very well. In Vista, there's not even an option for it. Is there another image viewer that has this functionality built in? Or am I basically SOL?

[sitheris]

anyone?

[General Crespin]

Perhaps IrfanView (http://irfanview.com/) may be of some interest?

[Easykill1978]

Why does the Photo Viewer in Vista no longer smooth (or antialias) a picture when zooming in? In XP, the Picture and Fax viewer did this very well. In Vista, there's not even an option for it. Is there another image viewer that has this functionality built in? Or am I basically SOL?

mine is smooth as glass.. could be cause your system is busy or some piece of software is causing this.. too many factors involved..

[TechieSooner]

Can you post some screenshots of the same pic zoomed the same place so we can see what you're talking about? I don't see any issues with mine, either???

[pigster]

http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1056/compareot9.th.jpg (http://img201.imageshack.us/my.php?image=compareot9.jpg)

I chose an image of text because it's a lot easier to see the antialiasing

The top portion is from the Vista Photo Viewer, the bottom is from the XP Picture and Fax Viewer

As you can see, the bottom is antialiased much better.

[pxc]

It does AA when you enter a slideshow, but not during the interactive scaling.

[TechieSooner]

I don't see a huge issue... what's the goal we are trying to reach?

Ideally I could've seen the same zoom depth and everything to where you can see it better, as I'm not even entirely sure how bad it would be zooming Vista's in even closer.

[Blue Falcon]

There are a lot of tools and wizards in Vista that are far inferior to the ones that came with XP. I honestly can't figure out why the hell MS took a step back with some of this stuff.

Examples really quick off the top of my head:

1. OP's example of the previewer not aliasing images when zoomed. It worked just fine in XP and hell you'd think it would be a no brainer in Vista especially in GPU accelerated Aero mode.

2. The previewer doesn't display animated .GIF files properly anymore, it just shows the first frame.

3. The Vista camerta wizard is HORRIBLY crippled when compared with the one in XP. Plug your camera into an XP machine and you can selectively pick and choose which photos/movies to download from the camera. Oh no, not in Vista. In Vista you get a rather stupid singular 'all or none' dialogue. Way to go M$.

Yadda yadda I could go on. The OP will need to look to a third party tool...

[pigster]

I don't see a huge issue...

It's not the end of the world, but the tool in Vista is clearly inferior in this area

[DeaconFrost]

The tool is Vista does allow for some basic cropping and photo clean-up as well, so in some ways it is a far superior add-in, so to each his own. I have run across the camera wizard part however, and that could be a frustration, especially for less tech savvy people.

[sitheris]

Thanks pigster for posting that comparison.

It isn't really a huge issue, hence the thread title of 'Small Gripe' :)

Does anyone have suggestions on third party apps that would AA images?

[dot_Zen]

There are a lot of tools and wizards in Vista that are far inferior to the ones that came with XP. I honestly can't figure out why the hell MS took a step back with some of this stuff.

[Snip..]


I'd wager a guess that the dev team in charge of Windows Photo Gallery (and other windows apps) would use the same answer that can be found at 'The File Cabinet (http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/file-backup-in-windows-vista-faq.aspx)' blog(http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/file-backup-in-windows-vista-faq.aspx) when asked why the new Back and Restore utilities were made 'too simple' and had fewer features/options than previous versions of the same apps:

[Snip..]We wanted the Windows Vista backup and restore features to be accessible and easy-to-use by our core consumer audience.
layman's meaning: Microsoft is dumbing down "Power User" type tools, or migrating them into "Professional" packages, in order to make the OS-environment more "accessible" to the mainstream.

Personally, I don't agree with that school-of-thought on accessibility (there are two schools, maybe more). Some developers/designers think that, to be "user-friendly" you must make a UI simple enough to use for the greatest common denominator. Others (like myself) strive to accommodate both (or many) types of users--within reason--by equipping defaults, allowing profiles, having separate option areas (prone to be found by advanced users, or avg. users getting curious) and give as much flexibility and scalability as possible.

Unfortunately, I'm not at the level in my Dev carrer to make any of those calls around companies like MS, other major corporations, or design firms--yet. But, maybe 1 day. ;)