Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Microsoft Office Picture Manager is a software program included with Microsoft Office suite starting with version 2003. It is a basic image-editing and image-management program, designed to be similar to iPhoto and other such applications. It replaced Microsoft Photo Editor, which had been included since Office 97.

The program went through several name revisions while in beta, notably starting out as Microsoft Office Picture Library 2003, then losing the 2003 designation (more reserved for the actual Office applications) in beta 2, and finally settling on the current name. In Office 2007, the Help - About screen image has been changed to a generic Office application image.

The Picture Manager has a few capabilities not present in the Paint program included with Windows. It has the ability to crop, resize, and convert images between various formats like Paint, but with comparably better picture quality, due to being able to select compression level.

It also sports several more advanced capabilities, such as batch editing/saving/renaming, fine-tuning of midtones, highlights, and shadows, and red-eye removal. On the other hand, it has easy-to-use features such as one-click image compression, and resizing to a user's own choice. It does not however, offer any sort of actual drawing or text-editing tools.

One of its unique features is the ability to link and upload pictures to a Microsoft SharePoint picture library. Therefore, a user can easily share photos among team members over the Internet. It is also possible to easily export photos from the program to other Office programs, while allowing a user to specify custom image dimensions.

For more than just basic tasks, most users would probably wish to use a more powerful program such as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks, or The GIMP. Also, users running Windows 2000 cannot print images using Picture Manager, whose printing function requires a wizard distributed with Windows XP.