The Windows Phone 7 Review

Pictures Hub

While you can view photos in a somewhat ad-hoc manner from within the camera application, there’s a much better photo viewer tucked into the aptly named pictures hub. Unfortunately however, WP7 makes the same mistake that Apple does, tossing videos inside under the domain of pictures as well. Oh well.

Fire it up and you’ll get three options - all, date, and favorites. You can pivot right and see some random thumbnails of favorite photos and recently captured media, and pivot one more to see photos from facebook under what’s new. Tap all, and you’ll get transported into a gallery listing which includes your camera roll on the device, as well as all your associated facebook galleries.

Inside the camera roll gallery, you get just what you’d expect - a grid of photos. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in landscape. It’s portrait only here.

Viewing photos is a landscape or portrait experience, and thankfully the grid view and photo viewer are both incredibly speedy. Hit the ellipsis to expand options, and you get the same options I mentioned earlier for sharing to SkyDrive, Facebook, marking as favorite, or deletion. Videos however only show up in landscape, and again can only offer deletion from the device. Getting those movies off-phone requires a desktop sync.

The interface is definitely pretty though:

As Anand mentioned, all your facebook albums are treated like they’re stored locally. What’s really well done here is that all the photos come down with comments and captions completely intact.

Photos works well, but it’s still missing some obvious functionality the competition has. There’s no ability to select multiple photos in the grid view and send all those to the cloud, delete, or email them off. After shooting a ton of photos in quick succession to make sure the camera app didn’t slow down, I was then forced to delete individually - bleh. The other missing thing is slideshow functionality which is occasionally handy but not critically important. Honestly, both of these are things that are easily fixed with a software update.