I have been using Windows Vista full time since they dropped the Pre-RC1 build last week. So far, so good. I had a welcome surprise this evening though when I plugged my EOS 350D into the computer and Vista recognised it straight away and let me pull down photo’s into the new Windows  Photo Gallery.

It  doesn’t sound all that fantastic, does it.

About 2 weeks ago when I bought my iPod and Camera connector I had switched the camera over to using the Print/PTP protocol over USB as this is the protocol required to pull photos down to the iPod from the camera directly. I had inadvertantly left the camera in this setting, and thought about this as soon as I had plugged the camera into the computer. To my surprise, Windows Vista recognised the camera as an EOS 350D and proceeded to ask me if I wanted to pull the photos into Windows Photo Gallery and tag them all as they came down.

A big thank you to all the hommes and femmes working on camera support in Vista, you have potentially made my life much less frustrating not having to [remember to] constantly switch the camera between Print/PTP and PC Comms mode.

The next thing I need to do is see if Zooomr automatically recognises the tags I add when importing into Vista. [Ed: Nope, Zooomr didn’t recognise the tags added in Vista. Bummer.]

PS. Windows XP may be able to comms in the Print/PTP protocol – I can’t remember if I ever tried using it before in XP. Either way it didn’t have photo gallery software.