Microsoft finally shows some love to raw shooters

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This is what you see unless you make Windows Live Photo Gallery the default program association for the raw file type.

(Credit: Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)

Microsoft finally shows some love to camera raw shooters, but it feels like more of a hug than a big, sloppy wet kiss. The company now offers a free download of Microsoft Camera Codec Pack for Windows 7 and Vista users that will render thumbnails and display previews of most popular raw camera formats. (A complete list is available at the download site.)

About mid-Vista vintage, Microsoft introduced its own "open" raw format that it hoped camera manufacturers would adopt for better integration with Windows, but the major camera companies tend to be notoriously proprietary about their raw formats and no one really raced to adopt it. The only notable cameras supporting it are/were the Nikon P6000 and P7000 with the NRW format. So I suppose we can take this as Microsoft giving in to the inevitable.

It didn't give in terribly gracefully, though. When you download the codec pack, you can immediately preview the images in Windows Live Photo Gallery. But in order to get the OS to display rendered thumbnails, you have to make the Gallery the default application for working with those files. That's fine unless you happen to prefer another application--oh, say Photoshop--to be the default. Making Gallery the default doesn't preclude you from using another application, but it's annoying nonetheless. You can sort of get around it by associating the file type with Gallery, displaying the Explorer window with the rendered thumbnails, then changing the association back to whichever application you prefer. Windows doesn't delete the cached thumbnail.

(via @lanceulanoff)

Originally posted at Crave

Lori Grunin 27 Jul, 2011

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Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20083654-1/microsoft-finally-shows-some-love-to-raw-shooters/?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheDownloadBlog
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