Easily Change Windows 7 Login Background with LogonStudio
The default Windows 7 login blue colored background screen looks nicer if compared to the older versions of Windows. However after looking at it for a while, one may get tired of it and starts to look for a method to change to a better looking login screen that suits them. Microsoft has made it possible to customize to logon screen by changing some registry but to make things easier, you can use LogonStudio made by Stardock.
LogonStudio is a free program that allows users to change their Windows 7, Vista and XP logon screens. It comes with several logon screens to choose from, along with over 400 that are available online from Web sites such as WinCustomize.com. With this tool, you can use Windows 7 logon screen on XP or XP logon screen on Windows 7. You can also in fact disable the logon screen background by selecting a plain background color for desktop and set the LogonStudio to use My Wallpaper.
LogonStudio is very easy to use. After installation, run the program and there are more than 50 built-in background screens for you to choose. Just select the screen and click the Apply button will instantly changes the logon screen to the one you chose. Changing Windows 7 login screen can’t get any easier than this.
Fix Right Click Edit JPG Image Problem in Windows 7
If you are using Windows 7 that has been upgraded from Windows Vista, you might have encountered a problem when right clicking a JPG image file and selecting the Edit from context menu gives you the error “There was a problem starting C:\Program Files\Windows Photo Gallery\PhotoViewer.dll . The specified module could not be found.”
This problem is caused by Microsoft changing the name of the default image editing software from Windows Photo Gallery to Windows Photo Viewer. So when you have upgraded from Vista to 7, Microsoft has somehow forgotten to fix the Edit menu to point to the new location and still uses the old Windows Photo Gallery PhotoViewer.dll
The fix for this error is easy but it involves in editing the registry. Make sure you follow the steps carefully because wrongly deleting the registry could cause further problems in Windows 7. Click the Start orb button and type regedit at the search programs and files bar. Hit enter to launch regedit.exe. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > jpegfile > shell > edit. By default a clean Windows 7 doesn’t require the edit key for the jpegfile shell. At the left pane, right click on the edit key and select Delete.
When you right click and select Edit on a JPG image file, it will now uses the default Microsoft Paint application. For more advanced users, you can set the Edit to use your favorite image editing software by changing the default value of the edit > command to the value below:
"C:\Path\To Your Editor's\executable.exe" "%1"
Move or Copy Digital Camera Photos to Computer with Camera Downloader
Copying or moving a bunch of photos from your digital camera may not seem difficult because all you need to do is either connect the digital camera to the computer or take out the memory card, insert it to a card reader and then connect the card reader to the computer. Then you will need to open the destination where you want to move the photos to and then select all the pictures, right click on it and select cut. Then paste it to the directory where you want the photos to be saved.
An easier way to automate this with two clicks is by using Camera Downloader. It is a free and very small .NET framework coded tool that weighs only 34.5KB which is able to automatically transfer all the photos from your digital camera to your computer. First you will need to edit the CameraDownloader.exe.config file which contains the path of the Picture and Card. Then connect the memory card to the computer and run Camera Downloader. Click the Start button and the photos are auto moved to your computer.
We could not get CameraDownloader to run in Windows 7 as it crashed instantly with the window CameraDownloader has stopped working. Windows can check online for a solution to the problem. This tool is pretty old, last released and updated on Sep 5 2008 which was 2 and half years ago. That could explain the non compatibility with the latest Windows 7 operating system. As for Windows XP, we have tested and it worked flawlessly.
Add Useful Image Toolbar In Firefox
Internet Explorer 7 and 8 no longer has the image toolbar that you see in Internet Explorer 6. The Image Toolbar allows you to save, print, email and open My Pictures folder when you move the mouse pointer over a picture and the Image Toolbar appear in the top left corner of the image. If you think that this feature is somehow useful to you, you can now have this feature in Firefox web browser.
After installing Image Toolbar extension for Firefox, moving your mouse cursor to an image will show a toolbar save, copy, print, info and open folder. The info button is an additional feature which you cannot find in the old Internet Explorer 6 Image Toolbar. Since Firefox 3.6, the Properties menu is no longer available for you to check for extra information about the link or image. This Info button brings you directly to the image file in the Page Info media which gives you the full location, type of image format, size of the image file, dimensions in pixels measurement and associated text.
By default the image must be bigger than 260px x 260px, or else the Image Toolbar will not show. You can either press the Ctrl key to overwrite this restriction or set it in the plugin options.
Download Full Picasa Web Albums via RSS Updates
Picasa Web contains many public photos which can be viewed or downloaded for free but if you want to download the whole album, it is going to take a lot of hard work because you have to open the full image and then right click to save it on your hard drive. There are many ways and applications that enables a user to automate downloading photos from Picasa Web Albums.
One of the way is by using Picasaweb Album Downloader which is a lightweight Java application that can be run on any operating system as long as Java is installed to download the full albums from Picasa Web. There are 2 warnings when you try to run this Java application which is it tries to go online and the digital signature cannot be verified. Just ignore the errors and allow the Picasaweb Album Downloader to run.
You will be asked to enter URL address of the photo album RSS feed. In every Picasa Web album, you will find an RSS icon on the right pane, just above report abuse and report issue to owner. Copy the RSS link and paste it to the downloader and click Download. The program then asks you to select the location where you want to save the photos.
We noticed two problems with Picasaweb Album Downloader which is it sometimes unable to download all the photos from album and the photos that is saved does not have an extension and you must manually add the JPG extension to allow your default image viewer to open the image. The program was last updated on November 2008, and probably that explains the bug that we are experiencing during testing.
Download Picasaweb Album Downloader
Rotate Images on WebPages inside Firefox Browser
There are tons of images that is on the Internet and some there will be some people that doesn’t know how to publish the image correctly, making you had to tilt your head just to see the image properly. One way to view it properly is to download and save the image to your hard drive locally, and then use any image editing software such as Windows Paint to rotate the image.
Another simpler way is to use a Firefox addon called Rotate Image which allows you to rotate the images directly from the web page without saving it to your computer. The rotated image will smartly move the text so that the images doesn’t cover up the text. After installing the Rotate Image extension, restart Firefox browser as usual, and you will have 2 new options when you right click at an image. You get to rate the image in clock wise or counter clock wise.
The rotate image preferences window allows you to change the percentage of angle degrees and also the restriction of only allow to resize if image is larger than the defined width and height. There are some incompatibility between this extension with other extension namely “Image Zoom” and “Save Image in Folder”.
MediaSpider Auto Crawls and Downloads Images from Google, DevianArt and 4Chan
Google Images, DevianArt and 4Chan, these websites contains a lot of images which some are free to download and some copyright. Searching for images on these sites can be tedious and one of the automated way is to use Media Spider. Media Spider automates downloading of images based on keyword or selected categories and saves to your local hard drive. It is smart enough to auto crawl by itself to multiple search result pages and downloads the pictures.
To search in Google, you will have to specify the search string and number of results to download. The size of the image can also be specified. Searching and auto downloading from DevianArt is slightly more advanced with a couple of more features. It allows you to sort the results by popularity based on time and month and selecting a category. This gives you a more refined search results. Finally, downloading from 4Chan is based only on category. Once you click the Download button, you will be prompted on where to save the images at.
When MediaSpider has finished downloading an image, it will be shown on your screen. So if MediaSpider keeps on downloading, it will be like a slide-show showing you images of the categories that you have chosen to download. MediaSpider is a very simple application that is free to use and portable which doesn’t require to install. Just download and run.