When I’m not “messing around with technology” my main hobby is photography and last September I bought a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. Since then, I’ve taken almost 3000 digital images, all as 6 megapixel JPEG images, but for those images which are a bit more than just family snaps I’d really like to make use of raw mode (without needing to buy Nikon Capture software). Tonight, I found the Microsoft raw image thumbnailer and viewer for Windows XP.

Although this won’t allow me to edit raw images, according to Microsoft, it does provide “the ability to view, organize, and print photos captured in raw image formats from supported Canon and Nikon digital cameras”. There’s also a white paper on viewing and organising raw images in Windows XP.

In fact, there’s a whole load of digital photography resources on Microsoft’s professional photography and digital photography microsites (I picked that tip up via RoudyBob.NET), including a link to Microsoft’s press release on raw support in Windows.