I fixed a long standing quirk of mine with Windows 7 not playing Animated Gif, & not enlarging images smoothly like XP image viewer does.
After messing around all day with it today, I located 2 XP files responsible for it, as well as a 2 registry keys each for BMP, GIF, JPG, & PNG.
While I can make it work with other formats, I rarely use the others, so this works great for me!
One of the reg keys defines the default icon, while the other defines the location I have set for the 2 XP files. Now, whenever I open any BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG files, they open by default using the XP viewer. Which is much, much nicer.
In the future, I will make an SFX installer that will install the files, then import the required registry keys:
- Register location of XP files
- Register default icon of image file types
- Register the compatibility mode of one of the XP files
At long last, I am approaching happiness with 7. Now, I only have to work out the sound. I am thinking of trying a Xonar sound card, but this excites me to no end to have this break through. I cannot reveal all the details here, as I do not think that Piriform would approve, but I am very excited & happy to know that now, I can have the actual XP image viewer running from within Windows 7.
That was one of the biggest issues I had, & I hated to use Irfanview, XNView, etc, etc.
* Edit: Earlier, I tried using PictureIE, as well as many other "replacement" picture viewers, but just could not find the balance I was seeking between ease of use & not being overloaded in functionality. That has now all been solved, & the others can be junked! I never would have thought I can use XP image viewer in 7, but now that I dedicated a day to making it happen, it ROCKS!
Upon further thought, I intend to do still more work. And this time, to replace the Windows 7 image viewer with Vista image viewer, since Vista has a very good basic image editor built into the image viewer it uses...