RAW pictures on Windows

Panasonic Lumix LX3

Last month my father bought a Panasonic Lumix LX3 digital photo camera. It's a really nice compact camera that shoots great looking pictures. Among its many features, it is also capable of saving pictures in RAW format instead of JPEG: unfortunately, the format used by Panasonic is RW2 and there's no official codec for 64bit operating systems.

Luckily, there is a complete codec pack that relies on the new Windows Imaging Component (WIC) system that was released with Windows Vista: the Fast Picture Viewer codec pack. The codec supports a whole bunch of RAW picture formats (including the Lumix's RW2) and since it is so well integrated with Windows, every modern application (Windows Explorer of course, but also the default picture viewer, Live Picture Gallery... and every .NET 3.5 based program) can use the codecs to load pictures.

The codec pack also includes metadata support, which is then used by Windows Search to enable advanced queries on your picture collection. You will then be able to use all "image" property filters supported by windows search.

Please notice though that on remote shares Windows Search will execute the search query on the remote machine. This means that if the codec pack isn't installed on the computer that is sharing the folder, you won't be able to search using metadata.

If you need to edit your pictures, Windows Live Photo Gallery can save a copy of the image opened through the RAW codec (in TIFF, JPEG and WMPhoto format). If you use Photoshop, you just need to update the Adobe RAW codecs to get support for most new cameras.