Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 4 to support Geo-tagging

By damaster on February 22, 2010 12:04 PM

13 comments

It’s been a crazy weekend with Windows Live Wave 4 screenshots keeps coming. Kip gave us a glimpse in his previous post on Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 4, and this post will go a bit further as to what we’ve discovered about the new Photo Gallery. First things first, a full view of the new Photo Gallery:

We can see that compared to the screenshots leaked last December, we find two new tabs in the M3 release – “Find” and “Create”. The “Find” tab offers an alternative way to search and filter your photos and videos, as shown in the screenshot below:

Find tab

Do notice that this tab is in no way complete (as can be seen by the placeholder icons), and it is almost certain that this menu will be more intuitive than what is shown. But perhaps the most interesting feature would be the support for the long-awaited Geotagging support:

Geotag

Clicking on the Geotag button brings you a new pane which allows you to tag your photos via its geographical location, most likely to be powered by Bing Maps, as shown below:

Geotag pane

Although it has been a while until we’re finally getting Geotag support, nevertheless it is still good news that Microsoft is adding this to it’s full range of services, expanding its potential to even Messenger and Windows Live Photos. This is definitely good news. One thing to keep in mind however: while we briefly mentioned the new “Create” tab, we haven’t discussed it in detail, and word has it that it has something quite exciting. So stay tuned at LiveSide as we bring you the latest on Windows Live Wave 4!

Many thanks to our good friend Picturepan2 over at LiveSino.net for these screenshots.

Posted in News | Tags: Photo Gallery, Wave 4, Windows Live

Comments

tino

I’m not sure if the Ribbon UI is the right thing for such an application! If you compare this to the current version, it looks much more bloated and does need way too much screen real estate. I was always a strong supporter of the Ribbon. But for WL Photo Gallery it does not feel right.

technogran

And I disagree entirely! I love it! It does away with that annoying sidebar which contains all your files and the sidebar at the other side for editing therefore you might have lost some real estate at the top of the screen, but your actual working area will be wider. I asked for the ribbon to be applied across ALL of the Windows Live Essentials suite so that the user interface is then consistent throughout.

Chris

I wonder how a ribbion UI would work in messenger, notably the message window.

I’m also looking forward to seeing the new icons that will replace the orange ones here. After all the orange ones are likly placeholders.

technogran

It wouldn’t really work in Messenger would it? That’s the one app that really can’t use the ribbon in my estimation. It can use tabs though which I think its getting as is the next best thing!

Chris

Tabs should have came in with messenger 8 when the whole rebanding/new UI came in to play

anyone still miss the orgnial live messenger UI? Sire it was like a childrens toy, but it was very unique.

Chris

The current photo gallery does not fell right. The toolbar does not even use the same code as the windows explorer. Many of the UI elements are very buggy and off. This will be right in line with the other programs that have the ribbon. its a huger step forward and I like it, and looking forward to it

osu9400

THe Geotagging placcing holder was in the leaked screenshots from November/December. Could this be an screenshot? It doesn’t look any better than the one from 5 months ago.
Surikat

A question. Windows live Wave 4 will be abviable for windows xp?? i hope that yes because if not, microsoft is doing a bad move.

osu9400

They will be W32 apps, so yes i’m sure they will run on XP. You could probably run on W2K if you really wanted. You’re not going to get all the cool Vista/Win 7 Aero effects though.

Surikat

Thanks. I made that question because Windows Xp will start extended support soon and Windows live Movie Maker was not for Windows Xp.

Mario Albertico

Very good developments going on here. What I would like to hear more of is Windows Live Movie Maker. Will they actually have a descent offering since Movie Maker was stripped from Windows 7? I’m glad they made Movie Maker 2.6 available for download, but what a poorly executed experience that is for the Windows video-editing ecosystem. Considering more than half of YouTube videos appear to be put together using Movie Maker, you’d think they’d want to offer the best there. We need a timeline view! The rest of Windows Live Essentials appears to be getting huge overhauls, the same should be expected for Live Movie Maker.
http://twitter.com/josemoliver Jose Oliver

I have a lot of geotagged images already so I am really excited about geotagging support being included in the next release of WLPG. It has long been long overdue. My only concern is that it adheres to current IPTC/EXIF standards. I do hope the “Location” fields are mapped to the IPTC Location, State, City, Country fields.
http://twitter.com/webdotwiz webdotwiz

I’d love to see under the Create menu some integration with Deep Zoom and/or Seadragon for those who have megapixel panoramic photos. As well, Live Writer needs to be “loosened up” a bit to enable embedding of either or both Deep Zoom and Seadragon iframes or objects. As an aside, Live Photo Gallery’s uploader needs tweaking to cater for those of us (in Australia, anyway) who have very, very slow upload speeds which WLPG doesn’t seem to cope well with when uploading large photos (such as panoramas). Luckily, uploading directly in Live Photos now seems to work well on all occasions.

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