Photo Import feature of Windows 7 sucks

I guess if you’re used to Vista then the way you import photos in Windows 7 is nothing new, but coming from XP I have to say the way 7 downloads photos from a camera is pure crap.

I hated the feature from the moment I used it a few months back. You get this minimalist dialog box that wants you to enter a tag but doesn’t give any other information about what’s going on (is this metadata or the filename?). You can’t tell anything about where the files will end up. Then if you click Advanced, you can make changes, but then have to start the import process over again for them to take effect.

The major problem I have with this is that there is no way to selectively import photos; it’s an all or nothing proposition. For example if you take pictures at one location, then take another batch somewhere else, when you download them you can’t separate them out into individual folders. What the hell kind of thinking is that? And what really goads me is that this functionality was available and worked perfectly fine in XP!

I mean seriously, you take something that worked pretty well in the previous version, then strip everything down, remove most of the features and functions then package it up as a new and improved edition? What are you thinking? The only thing the XP photo import needed was a way to remove the trailing space before it appended the number to the end of the file. Other than that it was just fine.

But this photo downloader sucks. I hate it. I can barely tell how it’s going to work, I can’t move my photos around, it STILL puts a space then appends the number (which I then have to use another program to remove that damnable space), and I can’t tell it not to import a picture. The feature is useless to me. I guess I’ll either use Lightroom or Paint Shop Pro to import the photos now. The way Windows 7 does it is just too annoying. I guess I just need to shoot RAW all the time and just bypass this feature altogether, but I don’t believe most photos need to be shot in RAW so even that is a little overkill. Once again, Windows 7 just adds another layer of frustration.

And as a final thought, since this feature is identical to the one in Vista it still makes me wonder why everything feels Windows 7 is so much better than Vista. Microsoft recycled the same code all over the place; they’re basically the same OS. I think people are fooling themselves into liking Windows 7.

Just for the record, I don’t like Vista or Windows 7.