If you are a heavy user of Sidebar Gadgets, you are probably familiar with the SlideShow Gadget, included in both Windows Vista and Windows 7 by default. This gadget let’s you to display a photo slideshow on your desktop from your favourite photos. You simply select a folder in the Settings panel of the gadget and the content of that folder (optionally including subfolders) get’s displayed on your desktop.
But what if we don’t need all of the photos from the folder? Or if we need photos from one subfolder but none from the others? What if we have photos at different places on our hard drive or let’s say on different drives?
Here is a little combo in Windows 7 that let’s you solve this problem.
Let’s say, that I want to display my latest holiday photos on my desktop using the SlideShow gadget. I have photos in my Pictures folder, I also have some is a Live Mesh folder that syncs with my friend who accompanied me on this trip. So my first step is to unite these different folders using Libraries.
Libraries
In Windows 7, we have special folders called Libraries, which gather our files from different locations (like different hard drives or network drives) into one place where we can manage them together with our local files. We can easily add locations to a library and specify what files should be listed in the library. We can even create new libraries for work, school etc.
In my Pictures Library I included my Pictures folder and the Live Mesh folder that syncs with my friend. So now I can treat them as one unit so the SlideShow gadget can include all the photos I’d like to be displayed.
But unfortunately my friend is very messy, and he stores hundreds of different photos in our shared folder instead of storing them in subfolders. But no worries. All photos I am looking for are tagged with the name of the place we visited together (Aquincum). This is where Windows Search comes in:
Windows Search
So I open my Pictures library and I type the tag I am looking for into the search box.
Now I have all the photos I need. But before my gadget could use these and ONLY these, I need to save my search, which is as easy as clicking the save search button. After that, my search appears in the Searches section under my username.
That’s all! The only thing left to do is to tell the gadget to use this saved search and display all the photos it contains. For this I click on he Options button on my gadget and I browse the search folder and select the search I have just saved. As you can see I can even select only certain subfolders in the search if I want. But for now I select the search and click OK.
It’s that easy. And you can save additional searches so you may change your desktop photo stream depending on your mood. And thanks to Live Mesh our shared folder synchronizes whenever my friend adds more photos to it, and as long as she tags them with the search tag I used, they will automatically appear in my search and SlideShow. Thanks for reading this quick tip and feel free to experiment and find out what you are capable of using Windows 7.
