Microsoft Picture It incompatability with Windows 7 and alternatives for .mix files.

I have posted various suggestions about alternatives to Picture It and found most of them lacking in some way. Paint.net is one of them and, of the free programs, I like it the best. But the instructions are useless. They have a forum but a quick look at it has not impressed me greatly. I have now gone back to a program I already had on my computer because it came bundled with a scanner I bought. It's Arcsoft Studio 6. Having looked at the other programs, I have come to realise how good it is. It looks as though it does everything Paint.net does, but it adds an online manual which explains very clearly how to do everything. Without that it would be as mystifying as Paint.net. The snag is it costs about £50. You can have a free trial to see if you like it. 

Beware of offers of free Photostudio. These are for Zoner Photostudio, which I have tried but didn't get on well with at all. There may also be free Photostudio offers which are scams. Arcsoft's program should be downloaded only from their website.

John Presland

Using IE6 to enable Picture It sounded a good idea, but that won't install on Windows 7 either. I discover it is possible to run a virtual IE6, but it looks too complicated. I'm also put off by the fact that I installed a virtual Vista desktop which allowed me to run Picture it, but I couldn't get edited photos produce on it to transfer to Windlows 7, where I wanted to use them.

John Presland

Digital Imaging Suite, though still occasionally available on Amazon, seems rather expensive. Some of the offers are just upgrades to the 2006 edition and won't work unless you already have that. 

I'm not sure why Windows Photo Gallery hasn't featured more in this thread. I had confused it with Windows Photo Viewer, which is a standard part of Windows and not much good for picture editing.  Photo Gallery is an additional free download. It is part of Windows Essentials and can be downloaded by searching for that.  It is not as good as Picture it or Digital Imaging, but it provides for most basic editing and is very easy to use. It depends what you want. Things it won't do which Picture It did are:

Altering the resolution of a picture - you can  change only the total number of pixels, not the number per inch. But Paint will do it and that's a standard part of Windows.

Editing particular parts of a picture without changing the whole. Picture It had cutouts for this, which is an easily understood version of what other programs call layers. 

Some users will not be bothered by these omissions, but they are crucial for me. Paint.net (not the same as Paint) is a free program which will alter resolution. No doubt it will also do the things that Picture It cutouts do, but the instructions provided are useless. I cannot grasp what I am supposed to do with layers, and my trial and error behaviour has achieved nothing. There are helpful suggestions online (not from the Paint.net people) about how to carry out some other editing, but not on this one. Has anyone used Paint.net for editing selected parts of a photo and, if so, could they explain the process?

John Presland

I have Picture It 2000 and it installed always on xp no problem Provided the version of Internet Explorer I had installed was not above IE6.

Why Picture it fails to install on Windows 7 is that it uses data included in IE up to IE 6, any explorer version higher does not seem to include  the data required!.

An excellent alternative program that does most of Picture It operations is, Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006, it has been discontinued by Microsoft but occasionally can be found on Amazon.

Only buy the Digital Image Suite Version which supply's two discs, the second disc contains the calendar

and templates for birthday cards etc. like Picture It.

Reg Spice.