Microsoft Photo Editor is a

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor (also called bitmap graphics editor) is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap ...

component of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

first included with

Microsoft Office 97 Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of Microsoft Office, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996. A Mac OS equivalent, Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition, was released on January 6, 1998. Microsoft Off ...

. It features editing tools to texturize, create negatives, adjust gamma, and add transparency to

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

images. It was replaced in

Microsoft Office 2003 Microsoft Office 2003 (codenamed Office 11) is an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for its Windows operating system. Office 2003 was released to manufacturing on August 19, 2003, and was later released to retail on October 21, ...

Microsoft Office Picture Manager Microsoft Office Picture Manager (formerly Microsoft Picture Library) is a raster graphics editor introduced in Microsoft Office 2003 and included up to Office 2010. It is the replacement to Microsoft Photo Editor introduced in Office 97 and i ...

, although many Photo Editor features (mostly visual effects and tools) were not available in Picture Manager.

Issues

Early versions of Microsoft Photo Editor, including the version bundled with Office 2000, do not preserve

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

from

digital camera A digital camera, also called a digicam, is a camera that captures photographs in Digital data storage, digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film or film stock. Dig ...

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

images. The Office 2000 version sets the

display resolution The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor, or other display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resoluti ...

metadata of BMP files to 0 by 0, regardless of what resolution is set through the program UI. Version 3.0.2.3 and earlier have a 10

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...

resolution limit. Large bitmap BMP files can be opened in Microsoft Photo Editor 3.0.2.3, as well as, e.g. a 4000×2578 (10.3 megapixels), 15 MB JPEG image. Version 3.01 has an issue where, under certain circumstances, the program opens minimized with no way to maximize it. The solution is to delete the "InitialPosition" entry in the following

Windows Registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, a ...

location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Photo Editor\3.0\Microsoft Photo Editor The following script can be saved as a .reg file to fix the issue in Windows XP and later versions: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Photo Editor\3.0\Microsoft Photo Editor"InitialPosition"=-

Issues

See also

References

Further reading