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Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP

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I’m an avid photographer, but you wouldn’t know it from my photographic record of late.  Part of my excuse for the recent drought (apart from boring excuses like starting a new job) is being spoiled last summer in Canada with borrowing my Dad’s Nikon D70, a digital SLR that takes my own trusty but aging CoolPix 4500 and blows it out of the water.

A Digital SLR like the D70 can be configured to take shots in RAW mode, in which it essentially dumps the camera’s sensor readings and settings to a proprietary file format.  Saving photos in RAW mode (as opposed to TIF or JPG) significantly increases the size of your files, but also improves both your image quality and also your ability to do post-processing on the PC.  For me, half the fun is in that post-processing phase.

Up until now, Windows has had no native support for viewing proprietary RAW files; you needed to use a program provided by your camera manufacturer, or rely on the ability of an image editing package to import the file.  Microsoft has just released a PowerToy this week called Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP that provides the ability to view, organize, and print photos captured in RAW image formats from supported Canon and Nikon cameras.  Here’s a whitepaper on the PowerToy and a link to download the PowerToy itself.

Finally, here's more information on the long-term strategy for the RAW file support into the Longhorn timeframe.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2005
    Thanks for the RAW info...have you looked at Google's free Picasa 2? It allows EXIF display of all data associated with the photo. And it is a great storage, management, editing tool. Plus the new Hello feature allows convenient uploads to blogs. Have a look by going to Google and clicking on more (at right) then download Picasa 2.
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2005
    Thank you Louie; I've been meaning to look into Picasa and just haven't found the time. I'm particularly intrigued by the possibility of making it super-easy to post thumbnails of photos to a blog. MSN spaces has some functionality around that as well (see a few posts back for what Brendan Tuohy has been doing with his photos). Meanwhile, it will be great to have RAW support in Windows Explorer!
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2005
    I saw this over on Robert Burke's weblog.
    Microsoft has released a powertoy that allows for raw image...
  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2005
    Pretty cool! Pity its not integrated into System.Drawing :(
  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2009
    PingBack from http://quickdietsite.info/story.php?id=12208