Vista’s Photo Import tool, in my opinion, (aside from Tag support) is a complete step backward from what we’ve got in Windows XP. In XP, I can pick and choose which photos I want to import at a specific time. With Vista, I get no choice what-so-ever. It just imports all photos and creates a directory for me. Vista’s Photo Import tool does give me some neat options on auto-naming folders when do imports but that doesn’t go far enough – its still far too constricting.

Robert says:

I echo Brandon’s hope that this is one of the “surprises” Microsoft has planned for RTM. But at this point, if you’re copying photos from your computer in Vista, I wouldn’t even bother with the Photo Import Wizard. Better to use the new thumbnail features in Windows Explorer to do the copying instead.

Paul says:

Let’s talk photo import. It’s broken in Windows Vista, horribly broken. Here’s why. In Windows XP, you could preview the pictures on the attached camera and select exactly which photos to download. That way, if you had several events captured on the memory card, you could download them separately be stepping through the wizard once for each event. In Vista, you can’t choose. You get all these great file naming and tagging options, but you have to download the entire contents of the camera in one giant whack. That, friends, is just stupid. It’s less useful than photo import in XP.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this but… I don’t think it’s broken at all. In fact, I think this is a huge step forward for the photo import tool. Why? Because I’ve seen Ponzi plant her damn camera images all over her damn hard drive and then give me a hard time when she couldn’t find the damn things again.

Forcing a destination? Thank you, Microsoft. Forcing people to apply tags (even though they should be called keywords) to individual photos? Thank you, Microsoft. Forcing a complete download? Thank you, Microsoft. Seriously. If you don’t like it, you’re likely a “control freak” geek – and you can do whatever you wanna do with the damn things through the Windows Explorer.

McLaws just IM’ed me to say that Vista only tags photos en masse, which is completely asinine. Then again, what can you expect from a half-baked operating system that will ship with more bugs than actual features?!