Okay, so far we have covered importing your photos into Photo Gallery from your camera or phone, editing your photos, uploading your photos, making a panoramic picture and a Movie with Photo Gallery.  So what else can we do with our photographs using Photo Gallery? Well, there are lots of other extra and exciting things we can do with our photographs, but they do require the use of additional programs in order to be utilised so let’s take a look at them shall we?

1.  This post deals with the first extra, AUTO COLLAGE and you can download it from HERE. plus at the moment its on a 30 day free trial.

2.  Once the Auto Collage program is installed on your computer, then open WINDOW LIVE PHOTO GALLERY and choose a picture folder where the photographs are that you intend to include in your Collage. For this how-to,  am going to choose some taken recently in our local park when all the lovely blossom was out in full bloom.  I will also choose to include a picture of my daughter so that I can show you how to make someone the focal point of the Collage. You don’t have to include anyone in your Collages but it is nice to have someone as the focal point with all the other photographs surrounding that person.

3. So click on the photographs inside the folder that you intend to include, then click on the EXTRAS tab in the Live Photo Gallery taskbar, and select ADD TO AUTO COLLAGE.

4 .The AUTO COLLAGE screen will then open and your chosen photographs will be inside the CREATE screen.  If your chosen photos include one or more of a person, then in order to enable the AUTO COLLAGE program to place the photograph that contains the person in the middle or as the main focus of the completed Collage,  we need to instruct it to include face recognition.

5. So before creating your collage, click on the OPTIONS icon.  You will then be presented with the OPTIONS screen.  This contains three separate TABS as follows, OUTPUT, INPUT and REGISTRATION.

6 For now, click on the INPUT tab.

5. Now click inside the small square at the left hand side of DISPLAY DETECTED FACES.  A cross will then appear in the square to indicate you have enabled that choice,and then just click on OK.

6.  Now let’s create our Collage.  Just click on the CREATE icon on the top right hand side of the AUTO COLLAGE screen, and the program will then take your chosen photographs, and arrange them into a Collage with the chosen person focused in the middle surrounded by the other photographs from your choice. Clever eh?

7. You now have other choices offered about what you want to do with your completed Collage. You can choose to SAVE your completed Collage to your computer, or you can SEND your Collage as a PHOTO E-MAIL to someone if you are using WINDOWS LIVE MAIL, or you can use the completed  Collage as your desktop background.  So just click on any of the icons of your choice.

AUTO COLLAGE is a brilliant edition to WINDOWS LIVE PHOTO GALLERY and gives you another fantastic method of displaying your favourite photographs. I hope you have lots of fun creating some wonderful and attractive Collages from within Live Photo Gallery. And here is my completed Collage!

TG