I'm running a version of Windows 7 Professional on my laptop. Just the other day, I finally bought a Mini Memory Card for my flip phone that enabled me to copy pictures from the phone to this computer. Here's the question (and the problem):

When I import pictures from my digital camera they seem to be stored in two places that are apparently closely linked. One of those places is Libraries/Pictures and the other is Windows Live Photo Gallery.

When I copied over the pictures from the phone, the first thing I noticed was that while the folders I created for the phone pics appear in the Live Photo Gallery list, the folders are empty. After a bit of clicking around, I noticed that I could find the pictures in the "Picture Library" section.

I just tried highlighting all the pictures in one of the folders and Copying them into the folder under Live Photo Gallery but couldn't get them to copy or move into the empty folders that appear there.

Any suggestions on what I need to do to fix this? The reason I'd like to have the pictures appear in both parts of the system--such as do all the pictures from my camera--is that there is a primitive "photo tuning" program associated with Live Photo Gallery.

btw: the method I used to transfer the pics from the phone was simply to drag and drop the ones from the "Mass Storage" list that appeared when I connected the phone to the computer. I dragged them into Libraries/Photos/My Photos then--after deciding they needed to be better organized--I created five or six folders and put the pics in them. Since photos from my camera appear automatically in the two locations I mentioned, above, I figured the same would be true of the phone pictures even though the camera imports them "automatically" instead of manually one--or a group--at a time.

oh!: And the thumbnails associated with the phone pics look "hazy" or "muted" as compared to the ones from the camera although the pictures themselves look fine when opened.

Anything listed in "Libraries" (photos, music, docs) are symbolic links or pseudo links of where the files are actually located. They aren't physically located in the path, it is more for better organisation or ease of access of those items. The pictures are physically where you actually placed them unless you went through the symbolic linking which could be why they are blank. Try copying again and this time go through the my documents/pictures route if that is where you want them stored. You can always place them elsewhere then add that folder into the libraries link by right clicking on libraries/myphotos folder or navigating to the my documents/pictures to see if that is where the pictures actually are.

Not sure about the windows live photo gallery, it may be another pseudo folder created by that program, I have only used Picassa and I know picassa likes to create pseudo folders in the program based on criterias like faces it recognizes and dates ect but those folders are never physically created on the disk.

Try this link to fix the thumbnails: Windows 7: How to Reset the Thumbnail Cache | a Tech-Recipes Tutorial (http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/4285/windows-7-how-to-reset-the-thumbnail-cache/)

This is going to be a handy thread. I am a technotard myself.

Did this work out for you RM?