oday’s PCs are increasingly designed around the idea of the “digital home”, with special emphasis on creative digital photography, movies and music. While Windows XP Media Center Edition is best equipped for handling this multimedia extravaganza, there are tools that not only enhance its own features, but help lift XP Home and Professional to similar heights, also.

 

The easiest way to manage your photo collection is with a tool like Windows Live Photo Gallery, which you can download from here – it works in exactly the same way as Windows Vista’s Photo Gallery tool, making it perfect for cataloguing your photos.

 

   The program automatically catalogues files from your My Pictures folder when you begin – as the step-by-step guide below reveals, you can then easily add more folders to the list. You can also import photos from a camera or scanner from the File menu – this uses a different wizard to the basic one provided by Windows XP, and includes the option for tagging your photos as they’re imported, but once followed, your photos will immediately be available in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

 

   The step-by-step guide also reveals how to keep your photos in order using tags, which enables you to create collections. When selecting photos, you can either select them individually by clicking them, or select a group of photos by holding [Shift] as you click on the first and last photo in the group. If you want to choose all of the photos in the current selection, just press [Ctrl] + [A].

 

   Windows Live Photo Gallery offers more than just a photo-cataloguing tool. Double-click an individual photo to view it at full size, where you can click Fix to perform some limited editing on it, or choose one of the other options to publish online, print (through your printer or an online photo processing company) or burn a data CD.

While Windows Live Photo Gallery’s editing tools are basic, they do exist: when you click Fix you’ll see options for removing red eye, correcting colour and lighting problems and so on. The original photo is backed up, so you can remove your changes at any time by clicking Undo.

 

   If Windows Live Photo Gallery’s editing tools are too basic, you need a more fully feature image-editing tool. If you don’t have one on your PC, then install the splendiferous Paint.NET from here - this gives you full control over your image (you’ll find the tools you need on the Adjustment menu). You’ll need the Microsoft .NET Framework installed – the program will prompt you to download this if it’s needed during installation.

If you’re looking for ways of editing your home movie footage on your PC, then you already have the tool you need in the form of Windows Movie Maker (you’ll find it on the Start > All Programs menu). Movies created in Windows Movie Maker can be distributed via the Internet, hard drive or even a CD, but you can’t create a DVD that can be played in a standard DVD player using the program.

 

   The Home Premium and Ultimate Editions of Windows Vista and 7 both come with Windows DVD Maker built-in, but XP (as well as Vista Home Basic) users can still burn DVD movies for free thanks to the fabulous open-source DVD Flick (click here). It’s capable of burning most video formats – including your edited movie from Windows Movie Maker - to a video DVD you can play back on your home DVD player. It's also supports the creation of menus and subtitles too, plus you can even integrate audio tracks into your DVD as an alternative or replacement for the one included with the video.

 

Windows XP’s built-in support for burning CDs is quite limited, and there’s no support for burning to DVD within the program itself. Numerous third-party options like Nero and Easy Media Creator exist, but these have a heavy footprint, cost serious money and cause problems with your CD and DVD drives, particularly if you remove them.

 

   You’ll find an effective, lightweight and completely free DVD-burning tool in the form of CDBurnerXP (click here). When it comes to burning data CDs and DVDs, this is all you need, while the box below reveals how the latest version of Windows Media Player is now the perfect tool for burning music CDs.

 

   One of Windows XP’s clever features its ability to burn data to CD within Windows itself. You can drag and drop files to disc, but there are limitations: you can’t erase individual files from rewritable discs, and there is no support for DVD. Vista and Windows 7 remove this limitation, but panic not, because for a small outlay - just US$9.95 - you can purchase a more fully functional replacement in the form of NTI FileCD - see here for details. Also check out NTI’s Dragon Disc, which is even more versatile, but costs US$19.95 (see here).