Windows Photo Gallery not showing .gif

[Lucy Monostone]

Hello all, I had a little question :)

I recently bought myself a laptop with vista home premium.

But the standard image viewing program (photo gallery)

refuses to make .gif images move, I find this excruciatingly annoying.

Is there any way to fix this or does anybody know if this will be

updated in the next "update" or something?

I would really appreciate it if someone would inform me of this.

Thanks in advance

[nellie2]

I can't view gifs at all in the photo gallery.. so I checked help and it said the following

Notes

Only pictures and videos can be added to Photo Gallery. If you try to add a different kind of file, it will be copied to the Pictures folder, but will not appear in Photo Gallery.

There are many types of pictures, and not all will appear in Photo Gallery. Pictures with the .gif file name extension, for example, will not appear in Photo Gallery.

The photo gallery is just a place to organise your pictures, when I tried to open an animated gif, Vista opened it in my browser for me

[Lucy Monostone]

Yeah, I know but the image viewer, thing in XP showed .gif just fine.

Just so annoying when browsing my pic's, of which a large portion

are .gif, they don't move

And so, Windows took another step back in usefulness.......

While using more memory.

Vista looks nice, not really customizable though.

Ah well, maybe they will come up with a cure in the near future.

[nellie2]

Actually.. there isn't a photo gallery in XP, this is a new feature to allow you to catalogue and store your photo's. The default program on my XP installation for opening jpegs and gifs was the Microsoft Picture Manager.. although it might have been different on your XP installation, it all depends how you set it up. You can chose which program you want to open your picture files, the default is the Photo Gallery, but if you right click on the image and then go to 'open with' on the context menu... you can choose a different program to open your picture files

[rong]

Do you mean the filmstrip view in the folder, in XP that is. Don't have Vista so know nothing about it.

[nellie2]

This is an explanation about the photo gallery in Vista

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/...otogallery.mspx

[catbeef]

Bit of confusion here I see, let me try and clear this up.

Lucy Monostone is talking about this;

and nellie2 is talking about a photo album package that comes with vista, which sadly shares the same name.

In Windows XP, if I recall correctly, the thing Lucy is talking about is called "Windows Image Preview" or something to that effect, and I agree, the version in Vista not playing animated gif's is fairly irritating.

[nellie2]

Thanks for your input catbeef but I think Lucy is talking about Windows Photo Gallery that comes with Vista

I recently bought myself a laptop with vista home premium.

But the standard image viewing program (photo gallery)

refuses to make .gif images move, I find this excruciatingly annoying.

Is there any way to fix this or does anybody know if this will be

updated in the next "update" or something?

You can choose to open images with a different program if you wish, one that supports moving gifs! Obviously you will need to have it installed in the first place though, but you can right click on any image and then choose the 'open with' option on the context menu and open the picture with your program of choice.

[Eight-Oh-Eighty-Eight]

I believe I can shed some light on this issue. GIF is a proprietary format of Compuserve and anything that can display a GIF image must pay a bit of money to Compuserve. So it's looking to me that Microsoft took the cheep way out and just didn't pay Compuserve and therefore cannot display GIF images. While this sucks I can sorta see why. GIF images are quickly becoming more obsolete with broadband internet becoming more prevalent, eventually these tiny file sized, but low quality images will become a thing of the past. I still say that Microsoft should take some of the enormous price of Vista and pay for the rights to use GIFs, but hey, that's Microsoft.

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