Many people have been using Google's Picasa photo management software to store and share their photos in the cloud for years. It's free, easy to use, and makes sharing your photos with other people about as simple as it gets. But, as we've seen, Windows Photo Gallery offers a lot more features than the Picasa desktop app does, so if you're looking for good, free, photo and image editing software it makes a lot of sense to use that instead. What if you use Windows Photo Gallery on your computer but you've got a lot of Picasa web albums, especially albums that you have shared with other people, that you're not ready to move to a different format? Can the two be used together? Let's find out.

Although the notification area has been around since Windows 95, it wasn't very customizable and useful until Windows 7 was launched. Even though many know what it is and what it does (or at least in theory), few know how customizable it has become. In Windows 7 and Windows 8 you can change every aspect of its functioning and make it look and behave the way you want to. Here's how:

Irina Iacob's pictures showcase a fascination with the human figure and urban settings. A tireless photographer of beautiful people, industrial backdrops and a combination between nature and decay, 26 year-old Irina currently resides in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she studied Theatre and Television at Babes-Bolyai University's Faculty of Theatre. However, after graduating, her passion for photography took her in another direction. Her love of theatre has remained one of her chief interests though along with cinema, music and, of course, photography. She currently works in media monitoring, but earns money on the side as a wedding photographer. To find out more about Irina and what inspires her, we recommend reading her interview below.

Let's settle this from the start: this is not rocket science, it's not even a complicated thing to do. However, it is a question you may have to answer. If you handled computers before, the answer is a couple of clicks away. On the other hand, if you're like my mother, you call your child/friend at 7 a.m. and ask him/her how to do it. This tutorial is, mainly, for everyone who wants to save the cost of a call and do it on their own.

In previous versions of Windows, users would have had to install third-party applications in order to properly work with ISO image files. These disc image files, which store the entire contents of a single optical disc, can be used to install programs, play games, watch movies or do anything you could do with an actual disc. Windows 8 has changed all that by providing this feature into the new File Explorer. Let's learn how it works.

A lot has changed with the release of Windows 8. The new interface is stealing all of the buzz, but there is a lot more going on in this new operating system than fancy tiles and the new Start screen. Case in point, the new Task Manager. The basic tool included with every version of Windows since way back has gotten a facelift. It's got a bunch of new tabs that offer a ton of information that will appeal to everyone from a power user diagnosing system problems to a novice trying to find the Internet.

Do you remember those little disposable panorama cameras? They let you take a few very wide photographs on a roll of 35mm film. Since the advent of digital cameras, making panoramic photos has been done by merging several photographs together and, in the beginning, that was something you could only do with expensive editing software. Now, anyone can make a panorama using Windows Photo Gallery 2012 and the process could not be easier. Here's how.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 include a great little application you can use to record sounds - Sound Recorder. All you need is a sound card and a microphone plugged in, or a webcam with a microphone built in. Your recordings are saved as Windows Media Audio files and can be played by any media player. To learn how to use this program, don’t hesitate to read this tutorial.

Windows Photo Gallery has many great features. One of our favorites is face recognition, which allows you to identify and tag people in your photos. The more people you tag, the easier it is for Windows Photo Gallery to suggest tags and correctly identify people. Another great thing is that, if you publish your photos on Facebook, your tags will be published on Facebook as well. Tags can also be used as search criteria, so that you can easily find the photos the interest you. In this guide, I will show how tagging and face recognition work in Windows Photo Gallery 2012.

By default, Internet Explorer 10 and 9 use Bing as their default search engine. I like Bing and l am using it a lot more often than I used to, because their algorithms have improved over time. However, some people just want to use Google and are not interested in using Bing. For them, I have created this quick tutorial, showing how to add Google as the default search provider in Internet Explorer. This guide also works for the modern version of Internet Explorer 10, included with Windows 8 or Windows RT.

Windows Essentials is a suite of free programs that has evolved a lot over the years. At first, it was named Windows Live Essentials. Now it has been rebranded to a shorter, simpler name. To make things even more confusing, the number of programs included in this suite has evolved a lot over time. That’s why, in this article, I will explain what Windows Essentials are and how to download and install the programs included in this suite.

Very few people are aware that for each file stored on your computer there is a set of metadata associated with it, that gives information about its source, author and other important details, depending on its type. In this article I am going to discuss about metadata, what it is and the uses of it. Then, I will cover how to add, remove and maintain metadata for your files. The procedures apply to any version of Windows.