Windows Photo Gallery Primer - Pictures.pd4

This article covers the program Windows Photo Gallery and analysis of data file typically titled pictures.pd4 file and how to extract the content for review. Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) is a multimedia management tool developed by Microsoft and comes installed as part of the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. It is accessible from the Start menu under 'Programs'.

WPG allows you to batch preview photo and video content as a series of thumbnails serving as an electronic photo album. A user can add additional information or 'tags' to each entry including comments, ratings and other descriptive information.

The above picture shows WPG running and previewing both video and picture files. New files are added from the menu option 'Add Folder to Gallery'. Files can be previewed by tag, date or by rating, views can be filtered to show only picture, video or both.

The information generated when a user has previewed files using WPG is written to disk in a single file, this is typically titled 'pictures.pd4', one file exists for each profile on the computer in the following location:

VOLUME\Users\PROFILE\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery

The WPG data file can be readily examined using the tool WPG Viewer a forensic software tool which is part of the Simple Carver Suite and is capable of reading the 'pictures.pd4' file.

The WPG data (picture.pd4) file contains a wealth of information including but not limited to File Path information, file properties, source label (hard disk drive label), source serial (volume serial number), user rating information, tag information, comments and descriptions and thumbnail moniker.