How to Show Picture Tasks in Windows XP

October 17, 2008 | Filed Under Photography, Windows   841 views



How to Show Picture Tasks in Windows XP

If you are trying to manage your digital photos using Windows Explorer, the built-in file manager for Windows XP, you’ll want to have a helpful tool turned on called “Picture Tasks” (officially called “Common Tasks”). Open up your official My Pictures folder. It should look like this:

MyPictures

Notice the menus on the left? There are a lot of helpful tools that you can use in there. But if you opened up My Pictures and didn’t see the Picture Tasks, yours probably looked something like this:

NoCommonTasks

So if your Picture Tasks aren’t showing up, do this:

  1. Right-click on My Computer (usually found on the desktop) and click “Properties”:

    2. ComputerProperties

  2. Then select the Advanced Tab and click the Settings button under Performance:

    3. PerformanceSettings

  3. Scroll down in the white box until you find “Use Common Tasks in Folders” and check that box. Now click OK.

    4. CommonTasks

And you’re done! You should now have Picture Tasks when you open My Pictures.

MyPictures

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  3. Set a Static IP Address in Windows XP
  4. How to Change Views in Windows Explorer – Intro
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Comments

4 Responses to “How to Show Picture Tasks in Windows XP”

  1. Anna on March 4th, 2009 8:47 pm

    THANK YOU so much…I don’t know how I had done it before, but your answer was so straight-forward and now I have slide-shows~~YEAH!

    Thanks again!

  2. RoseGarden on March 10th, 2009 9:15 am

    THANK YOU SO MUCH, I for the life of me could not know how to fix this and I googled it and whala!! found you and ….. Thanks so much Rita,RoseGarden

  3. Sian on October 3rd, 2009 9:51 am

    Hi – just to say thank you for those easy to follow instructions which I found by googling “windows xp picture tasks”! My computer went away for a service last week and when it came back the picture tasks menu was gone. The man who did the service didn’t know how to get it back so I’m v happy to have done it myself!

  4. chandi on November 25th, 2009 10:09 pm

    hey,

    very easy to follow instructions…even i could follow! i do have a problem tho, my computer is actually missing the ‘use common tasks in folders’ option. every other option is there, just not that one. this is driving me insane, any idea why i would be missing that one option?