As we alluded to earlier, the Windows Live Developer blog over at http://dev.live.com has just posted about the new Photo Gallery API:

Today, I'm pleased to announce a brand new, simple framework that enables developers to create photo and video publishing plug-ins. The framework defines a set of interfaces that facilitate communication between Photo Gallery and the plug-in. The plug-in developer has creative control of the user interface of the plug-in and handles the details of communication with the 3rd party service. Plug-ins are managed applications; .NET Framework 2.0 or greater is required for the plug-ins.

The Photo Gallery consists of two types of plugin:

• The Windows Live Photo Gallery Publishing Plug-in Platform enables the creation of photo and video publishing plug-ins.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery Simple Extensibility Points provide ways to extend, customize, and integrate with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Expect a further post on this soon with some examples. In the mean time, check out the SDK on MSDN.