Natively, Windows Vista supports a wide range of formats and standards, allowing users to streamline file management to a maximum. But, there are scenarios in which Vista, in the configuration it ships by default, is unable to handle some file formats. Case in point: camera RAW file formats. Professional photographers will tell you that universal standards, such as JPEG, do not even come close to satisfying the need of capturing and having available as much information as possible in a single digital photography. This is where RAW comes in. The RAW file formats are proprietary standards, intimately connected with SLR cameras (varying with make and model) that offer superior image quality to mainstream formats.

"One of the features we added in Windows Vista was a platform to support for decoding camera raw images in Windows Photo Gallery (and later Windows Live Gallery), Windows Explorer, and Win32 & WPF applications. The camera IHV community has done a great job supporting this effort by creating codecs that enable raw files for various cameras. The Microsoft Professional Photography website just posted a page where you can download Codecs for Windows for your camera", revealed Kam Vedbrat, a Microsoft lead program manager, who worked on the Aero User Interface of Windows Vista.

Microsoft has been hard at work to ensure that Windows Vista (and sometimes Windows XP ) supports a wide range of RAW file formats. In this context, the Redmond company has collaborated with camera manufacturers, such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax and ArdFry, to produce a wide range of codecs designed to be integrated with the Windows operating system. Following the implementation of the codecs, users will be able to manage digital images saved in RAW file formats directly from Vista and XP.

"Windows Vista attempts to solve these problems by providing an extensible platform that allows support for these (and other) new file formats to be added to Windows by the owner of the file format. This support comes in the form of a codec, which users will get from their camera manufacturer, either by downloading it, or provided with a new camera body. The Photo Gallery will even detect the presence of these files and help you download a codec when it exists", Microsoft added.