When I first saw Windows Photo Gallery I was quite impressed. The integration
with Vista, the ability to do within the operating system what previously
required 3rd party applications to accomplish was most refreshing. Then I
started using the program and I quickly found a very flawed fundamental
program design hidden beneath Windows Photo Gallery.

If you use the program to do nothing but display pictures for your screen
saver, you will not run into this problem, but if you are like most people
you will use the application to retouch photos, make simple fixes, etc. You
will then encounter a serious problem.

If you modify an image in Photo Gallery and save it, Photo Gallery replaces
your original image with the modified version even though there is a button
clearly labeled “Revert to Original�. Photo Gallery moves your original image
to a folder called:
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Window s Photo Gallery\Original
Images
and prepends and GUID to the file name to construct a unique new filename .
Therefore an original file called IMG_2635.JPG gets rename to
{530FB1E9-0950-40F3-A4C5-715148FCEE37}-IMG_2635.JPG.

So what is the problem? Well there are a couple of problems.

First, assuming you are backing up data like you should, you will back up
your pictures from the Pictures folder which is where you placed them in the
first place. If you at some point have a hard drive failure and decide to
reload your backed-up pictures you will find that you have only the modified
version of the pictures, not the original images.

Second, storing original images this way wastes vast amount of disk space.
Let’s say you remove red eye from a 4MB image. Now you have two images that
total 4MB.

Third, if you use Photo Gallery to restore the original image, the original
image is copied back from C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Window s
Photo Gallery\Original Images to your Pictures directory, but the copy is
also left in C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Window s Photo
Gallery\Original Images. This continues to waste valuable disk space.

Third party applications such as Picasa, Lightroom, Bridge, etc. either make
use of XML, XMP, sidecar files or the like to avoid image duplicates.Let’s
hope Microsoft fixes this problem before Vista is released.