- [Instructor] Windows 11 comes with a bundled application
for organizing and editing your collection of pictures.
This application is simply called photos,
and I'm going to launch it from the start menu.
And when you launch the application,
you might see a list of your pictures,
or you might see an empty library.
I have some pictures here,
but we need to understand how they got here.
To do that, I want to click this button
near the top right corner to open this menu
and I want to go to settings.
So the photos application will show any pictures
that you have in the folders that are listed
here in settings.
I see the default pictures folder that's in the home folder
and a picture folder from my OneDrive.
You can add other folders to this list if you want,
or you can remove one of them by clicking the X.
So I have pictures in my library because I copied a bunch
of pictures to the standard pictures folder
earlier in this course.
Now, one more thing I want to point out here in settings
is under where it says appearance.
On my system, the photos application defaulted
to the dark mode
even though I have the light mode enabled system-wide.
Individual applications can have different light mode
and dark mode settings and I wanted you to see
that you can change that here if you want.
All right, so I'm going to click the back button
in the top left to go back to my library.
And another way to get pictures into your library is
to import them from your camera or from the memory card
from your camera.
I have my camera connected to my computer
through the USB cable.
So I can click this import button up near the top right
and I'll choose from a connected device.
And this is going to show me all of the pictures that I have
on my camera.
Now, in this menu, you can just select all of the pictures,
or you can only select the pictures that are on the camera
that you've not imported yet.
Or if you want, you can select individual pictures
just by clicking the little checkbox on the pictures.
So I'm just going to select a few of these to import.
Up at the top, we can see the path to the folder
where these pictures will be stored after they're imported
and you can change that if you want.
But I've got this all set here
so I'm going to click the import button and the pictures
that I've selected will be imported.
And I can see them here in my library.
Now I only imported pictures,
but you can import videos from your camera the same way.
And naturally from here,
you will want to browse through and look at your pictures.
And you can change the view as you browse
using these three buttons.
You can look at large thumbnails or small thumbnails
or switch back to the medium thumbnails.
Up at the top, looking at these tabs, I'm in the collection,
which shows my full list of all of my pictures.
If you want, you can go over to albums
and albums are smaller selections of pictures
based on a topic that you define.
You may find some albums
that the computer created automatically,
but you can also create your own albums here.
But let's go back to the main collection.
And if you want to view one specific picture,
you can just find that picture and click on it.
And then if you move your mouse cursor to the left
or right side, you can click these arrows
to flip through the collection.
You've got a toolbar up here at the top
where you can delete the current picture
and some other options.
And you can also go to these thumbnails down at the bottom.
And if you click this checkbox on multiple pictures,
you can see them side by side and compare them.
When you're finished with that,
you can click the back button up in the top left
and that goes back to one single picture.
And if you click that back button again,
you go back to your library.
And let's finish with a quick look at editing.
So here in my collection,
I'm going to find a picture that has some problems.
I'll click on it to select it.
And then I'll click this edit button
up in the toolbar at the top.
Now we can't go through all of the editing tools,
but let's do a quick overview.
First, up here at the top,
you can see that I am in the crop section
so I can grab these handles on the corners
and I can shrink this crop window down.
And I can also grab this slider
to straighten the picture a little bit
so now I've cropped it.
The button next to this up at the top
will give you some one-click filters.
And then this next button will give you manual adjustments.
So if this picture were a little too dark,
maybe I could grab this slider
and lighten it up a little bit.
But now that I've made some edits,
you'll see there's a button down here
that says save a copy.
But if you click the little arrow next to that,
there's actually a menu here and you have two options.
If you click save,
it will just save the changes that you've made
and you will not have the original version of the picture,
but if you hit save a copy, you will have both.
You'll have the original picture and the edited picture.
So I'm going to choose save a copy.
And depending on your setup,
it may ask you where you want to save that copy,
or it might just save it in the same folder
as the original picture.
If it asks you, just take a moment
and make sure it's saving the picture where you want it.
But now if I hit the back button up in the top left,
and now I'm back here in the collection
and you can see that I have two of those pictures.
One of them is cropped.
And then of course I have the original one.
So experiment with the editing tools,
knowing that you can always save a copy
and keep your original unedited photo as well.
You may hit the limit with the capabilities
of the photos application in Windows 11,
and there certainly are more robust applications
for organizing and editing photos,
but as a built-in solution,
the photos application is a great option for many people.