Picture files that have a .bmp extension may not appear in the Windows Media Center Picture Library in Windows Vista

Consider the following scenario:

• You are using a computer that is running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate.
• You have a folder that only contains files that have a .bmp extension (These files are called bitmap picture files).
• You start Windows Media Center in order to add these bitmap picture files to your Picture Library and to view the files.
• You run the Media Center Library Setup Wizard, and you add the folder that has the bitmap files as a watched folder.

In this scenario, even after you add the watched folder, the bitmap picture files do not appear in the Picture Library.

This problem occurs because the Windows Media Player 11 Picture Library no longer supports managing bitmap picture files or GIF files. Windows Vista can still recognize these file types, and they can be viewed in the Windows Photo Gallery. However, these files types no longer appear in the Windows Media Player 11 Picture Library. Because Windows Media Center uses the Windows Media Player 11 engine to manage multimedia files, you may encounter this problem if a watched folder in Windows Media Center contains only bitmap picture files.

To work around this problem, add one or more supported picture file types to the watched folder that contains the bitmap picture files. For example, add a JPEG image file to the watched folder. The folder will then appear in the Media Center Picture Library, and you can view all the bitmap picture files.

Note By default, the following folder contains several sample JPEG image files that you can use for this purpose:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.