LiveSide - News blog : Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photos Improvements

Sunshine — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:51:00 GMT

As the number of megapixels in cameras increases, and making panorama pictures has been made easy with Windows Live Photo Gallery, it was time for Windows Live Photos to follow suit. Today a new release is being rolled out that bumps the limit on photo size up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels. And not just that, the image quality of photos has been improved too!

Furthermore, with today’s release, photo albums got faster to browse through, you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. How neat is that? Go and have a look!

For all you webmasters/bloggers out there: the Windows Live Photos team has also enhanced embedding images and photo albums into blogs and web sites. You get a real preview now rather than just an icon. Sharing just got better!

Windows Live on Mythbusters

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:34:00 GMT

Windows Live Photo Gallery has been featured in a number of commercials recently, and tonight in a variation on a theme, Photo Gallery made an appearance on the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. LiveSide reader Orion commented on it, and as luck would have it our friend Dena over at Neowin was able to capture the commercial and post it up on Soapbox (thanks, Dena!!!):

(Please visit the site to view this media)

While we’re liking the “Rookies” series, getting Windows Live on a fun series like Mythbusters seems like a great idea, and we’re hoping there’s more to come from the ad campaign.

By the way, although we haven’t seen it air yet, there is another :30 second ad in the Rookies series, this one with 8 year old Adam:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The Rookies - How Easy To Use Are Windows Live Products?

Sunshine — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:07:33 GMT

After rookie Kylie (4 and a half) and Alexa (7) showed off their Windows Live Photo Gallery skills, the Rookies ad campaign continues with a new series of video ads in which generations battle each other with their Windows Live Photo Gallery skills:

Panoramic Photos

Alexa, 7 years old. Allen, 70 years old. They’re rookies – new to the art of photo stitching. They battle mouse-to-mouse to see who can create a panorama the fastest - 7vs70 on MSN Video

Slide Shows

Adam, age 8. Dave, age 80. Two hungry competitors. Two rookies at slide-show making. One fast-paced race to see who can put one together the fastest - 8vs80 on MSN Video

Photo Sharing

Dmitri vs Dorothy. 9 years old vs 90 years old. Both rookies to Windows Live Photo Gallery. Both going the distance in a photo sharing face-off - 9vs90 on MSN Video

Want to know who wins? Go on, watch the videos! Clicking the images above will lead you to the page the videos are on, simply click on the video there to watch (Microsoft Silverlight Player). You will also find the projects the contestants created there. In case you don’t have Silverlight installed, install it here or click the link after the description, you will then see them on MSN Video.

7yr old makes panoramic photo: holds camera perfectly straight

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:13:00 GMT

7 year old Alexa is quite a photographer. In just a few moments she snaps some photos of her “fort”, creates a panoramic photo in Windows Live Photo Gallery, and somehow manages to get them all lined up vertically! Either that or she's got some mad cropping skillz she's not telling us about...

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Here’s the set of photos:

(Actually we’re just kidding about the photo skills – we really like the new ad series, and what’s advertising without a little creative license?)

Thanks Emil!

Windows Live Photo Gallery Sync enabled for some

damaster — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:44:50 GMT

Today both the Windows Live Sync and the Windows Live Photos & Videos team blogs announced the news that the gallery sync feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery has been enabled for a limited number of people. Here’s the announcement:

The Windows Live Sync team has partnered up with Windows Live Photo Gallery to let you synchronize photos between two computers directly from Photo Gallery!

Although you always could synchronize photos manually on http://sync.live.com, setting Photo Gallery to do it is much more convenient. Launch Windows Live Photo Gallery on two computers and sign in on each using the same Windows Live ID. Next, on one of the two computers click Setup gallery sync… from the File Menu in Photo Gallery and follow the instructions. You’re on your way to synchronizing photos!

Another cool thing about synchronizing your photos with Sync is that your edit history is also synchronized! You can undo edits you've made to your photos and even revert back to the original photo from any of computers synchronizing with the gallery.

Keep in mind that the current Sync limits (20 synchronized folders containing up to 20,000 files each) still applies. Also if some of your folders in your gallery are already synchronized, you’ll need to visit the Sync website to modify your existing sync settings.

Has this feature been turned on for you? Leave a message here and let us know!

Connect your Photo Gallery people tags with Facebook contacts: LiveUpload 2.0

damaster — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:35:10 GMT

When the new Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 3 beta was first released, we gave you a review of the new features and one of those was the ability to add plug-ins for the application. One of the first 3rd party plug-in developed was the LiveUpload to Facebook plug-in, published on the Windows Live Photo & Video Blog, that allow users to directly publish their photos in Photo Gallery onto Facebook. One of the advantage of this plug-in was that it takes advantage of the people tagging feature in Photo Gallery and publishes this information onto Facebook as well. However, the first release of the plug-in had one shortfall – the people tags published from Photo Gallery had nothing to do with all the contacts you’ve already got on Facebook.

But fear not, as this is no longer a problem. The latest release of LiveUpload to Facebook 2.0 introduces the ability to link your Photo Gallery people tags with Facebook users! Better yet, these links are actually saved so the next time you upload the same people tags onto Facebook from Photo Gallery, it will automatically link that tag with the Facebook user! Here’s a screenshot:

What this means is that if all the people tags in your Photo Gallery are actually linked from your Windows Live People contact list (including those in your Messenger list or added to your Profile Network), you’re essentially linking your Windows Live contacts with your Facebook contacts – through Photo Gallery!

Although this is a 3rd party application, we’re seeing that Windows Live is having closer ties with Facebook. We’ve already seen the ability to import your contacts from Facebook into Windows Live (and vice versa), and we saw the announcement at CES 2009 that Facebook has signed on as a Windows Live feed partner, meaning that you’ll be able to get content posted on Facebook, including photos, directly in your Windows Live What’s New feed. What’s also coming in the future is that the upcoming update to FrameIt might see some integration with Facebook photos. As the two competing social networks are becoming closer together, the potential there for both Microsoft and Facebook is enormous. It’d be interesting to see how this relationship develops in the future.

I’m a PC and I’m 4 and a half!

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:34:00 GMT

In the latest Crispin Porter & Bogusky ad in their $300 million ad campaign, set to air Sunday night during the Grammy awards, 4 and a half year old Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery to send a picture of her fish to her parents, enjoy:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Windows Live Photo Gallery gets new OEM partners, Sync integration, and more

damaster — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:59:33 GMT

Windows Live Photo Gallery from the Windows Live Essentials suite is getting some upgrades in the upcoming “Release Candidate” release too. Besides the many bug fixes (including the wlcomm.exe crash and 100% CPU usage bug), we also found out from Brian Hall’s interview that Windows Live Sync (FolderShare) will come installed along with Windows Live Photo Gallery to sync your photo albums across multiple PCs, as long as you sign in with the same Windows Live ID on more than one computer:

Perhaps more good news for Microsoft’s Windows Live push is that HP had recently signed up to include Windows Live Photo Gallery with all installs of HP’s Photosmart and Deskjet series printers. Here’s an except from their press release:

HP, the worldwide leader in printing solutions, will distribute Windows Live Photo Gallery with its consumer printers, including Photosmart and Deskjet lines, starting next year. The combined offer provides HP customers with Windows Live Photo Gallery, an end-to-end photo management and printing solution.

“Beginning in 2009, HP will feature Windows Live Photo Gallery and HP Creative Print Projects across the HP Photosmart and HP Deskjet consumer printing portfolios,” said Sam Greenblatt, general manager of Core Technologies, Imaging and Printing Group, at HP. “We are pleased to be working with Microsoft to provide an enhanced user experience for our customers. This offering will allow users to print, share, organize and edit a wide array of creative print projects at home, such as photo books, collages, cards and calendars.”

Comparing the interfaces between the current beta version with the upcoming new “RC” version, we’ve also noticed some minor enhancements that makes publishing to Windows Live Photos much easier. Notice how instead of “publish to Spaces”, you’re now able publish your photos directly to the new albums in Windows Live Groups and Events too! The new support for publishing metadata to your online albums also means that People tags will be synced across Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photos.

With a whole set of new partners signed up with Microsoft on Wednesday, we’re bound to see many more services (such as Photobucket) taking advantage of the new Publishing API to make photo sharing for us even more easier.

Windows Live Essentials strikes back – completing the Windows 7 experience

damaster — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:03:00 GMT

Remember Windows Live Essentials, the service that went through its early beta stages back in 2006 and never made it out of beta, that’s meant to “offer integrated and bundled e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, blog publishing, security services and other Windows Live entities into a seamless whole”? Today Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Experience Blog talked about how Windows 7 + Windows Live will “complete the Windows Experience” together – once again through the suite named “Windows Live Essentials”. The reasoning behind this, as explained by Brandon, is that:

Microsoft has learned that many end-user experiences need to be updated more frequently. Instead of waiting for the next Windows release, we began delivering updated versions of the Windows Live applications to improve those end-user experiences. While this was a great way to improve the Windows experience for users, many of these updates in Windows Live Wave 2 seemed duplicative of applications already in Windows.

To address this, Microsoft will now only ship these applications (which include Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer and now Windows Live Movie Maker) as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

Although branded with a new (or should I say “old”) name, “Windows Live Essentials” in simply the installer that we’ve been seeing since wave 2 that installs the entire suite (or selected applications) of Windows Live products, with the Wave 3 installer available at http://download.live.com. What’s interesting about Brandon’s post is that it showed us a few screenshots of the internal builds of Wave 3 applications, or the “Windows Live Essentials” suite, currently being tested inside Microsoft:

We notice there’s minor updates to all these applications, such as:

• Integration with Windows Live Photos in the Messenger conversation window
• Personal Status Message comes back in the Messenger conversation window
• Removal of the “said:” part in the Messenger conversation history
• A nice shade of blue in the background for Mail
• A new “Edit” submenu in Movie Maker
• Removal of more icons from the programs, especially in Messenger and Mail, to align with "Windows 7” design principles

The one major change that caught our eyes is the new icons for Messenger, Mail, Calendar, Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. It seems like Microsoft icon designers are obsessed with the “yellow ribbon” around their icons. Here’s a close up view of the new icons and also a close-up shot of a photo taken from the Windows 7 keynote at PDC2008:

Do these icon change and the “yellow ribbon” signify anything? Are they in any way related to the “yellow ribbon” around the Internet Explorer icon? Perhaps we’ll have to find out later. Stay tuned with us as we keep you updated on the latest Windows Live news.

Image Composite Editor Released

John OBrien — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:54:10 GMT

ICE, a technology behind Windows Live Photo Gallery advanced panoramic image stitching was released today. You can download the x86 here and the x64 here.

We have seen this technology in Windows Live Photo Gallery for some time now and more recently inside Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight.

Matt Uyttendaele has the lowdown announcing this as the best image stitching tool shipped to date:

A GPU accelerated orientation adjustment tool. Sometimes the automatic stitching software doesn't quite get the viewing direction correct, or perhaps you want to use a rectilinear projection instead of a cylindrical projection. This new tool allows you to interactively make these adjustments.

360 blending support. Our fast poisson blend technique now creates a seamless 360 blend.

Output to Photoshop layers.

Create an HD View web page.

Create a Silverlight Deep Zoom web page, including new 360 support in our Silverlight application.

Integration with both the Windows Shell and the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, so that you can quickly launch a new stitching project.

I fired up a 360 degree panorama in Vista64 and found the new application very fast and accurate. Take it for a spin yourself! Bonus points for the person that works out how to enable the “new 360 support in our Silverlight application”

Wave 3: Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features

damaster — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:14:00 GMT

Along with the Windows Live Wave 3 beta download package – comes the new Windows Live Photo Gallery that we’ve been talking about over and over again. First things first, here’s what you get when you load up Photo Gallery:

Simplicity is the word to describe my first impression of the new program. They have abandoned the Vista-feel to it by reducing the bottom rotating/zooming/viewing functions to the bottom-right hand corner. The menu bar up the top is now elegant white. But for those who wishes extra customisation like Messenger offers, I’d be sorry to disappoint you that similar to the previous version of Photo Gallery, it doesn’t support changing the colours of this menu bar at the top. But hey, it’s the rich functionalities that matters more than a colour-changing menu bar, right?

People Tags

So the newest and sweetest addition to Photo Gallery, as mentioned before, is the ability to tag your Messenger contacts or any person using “People tags”. From the window above, we can see that your Messenger contact list is loaded into the left navigation bar, provided that you’re signed into your Windows Live ID. Selecting a photo and then clicking the “Add people tag” will allow you to drag your cursor and select a person’s face:

Very handy feature there, it has a scroll-wheel that filters through your Messenger contact list as your type the person’s name. Here’s what it looks like when you’ve tagged the person in your photo:

Photo Sharing – integration with Windows Live Photos

Clicking on a contact’s name on the left navigation bar will bring up all the photos that have the person tagged in. What is not shown in the following screenshot is the new integration with Windows Live Photos. If a contact have uploaded and shared their photos on the new Windows Live Photos website, their photos and albums that have been shared will be able to be accessed from Photo Gallery also, and you will be able to download the entire album into you Photo Gallery, if you wish to do so.

Facial Recognition (Updated)

Searching through your photos has never been easier, thanks to the descriptive tags (the original “tags” in previous versions) and the new People tags, you can now easily search through your library and look for the perfect photo you want…..that is, provided that you have tagged them properly, which could be a pain especially having to re-tag every person in your entire collection of photos (think how you had to tag every single photo you uploaded onto Facebook manually). And this is where the question comes in – where did facial recognition go? We hope that it will eventually make a comeback in the next beta version. (Update: Sorry guys I must've missed it before, turned out that facial recognition is still in Photo Gallery) This is where Facial Recognition in Photo Gallery comes in handy.

After the automatic scan by Photo Gallery to detect facial features in your photos (and this may take a while if you have a very large collection of photos), you'll find that there will be a "People found" category when you click on "People tags" on the left navigation bar. Clicking on any of the photos with people found but not yet identified, and the following screen will appear:

You can then select the contact you want, or enter a new name not in your contact list, to add the people tags to the photo. Notice that this tool is not yet perfect, as you can see it skipped a person's face in the photo above.

Metadata Removal upon Publishing onto the web

On the right infobar you can now see a whole lot of new information such as camera metadata, ratings, and more. When uploading your photos onto Spaces (or the upcoming Windows Live Photos perhaps?) or Flickr, you may choose to upload these metadata or not.

Developer Plug-ins Support

Yes, Photo Gallery will join Windows Live Dev, allowing developers to develop plug-ins for the application:

What we don't know is what kind of plug-ins will be available, as the link to Windows Live Dev is currently not available. Will it allow plugins such as facial recognition? Or will it be plug-ins to allow users to publish their photos onto additional photo-sharing websites (like Facebook)? Update: Windows Live Photo & Video team blog has just posted information about 3rd party plug-ins - seems like our second hypothesis was right, the plug-ins will "includes a new Publishing API that enables the community to build plug-ins for virtually any sharing service".

Photosynth Integration and Extras

Last but not least, notice the “Extras” menu in the menu bar. In addition to stitching a panoramic photo, Photo Gallery now also integrates with the latest Photosynth technology that was released not long ago (only if you have Photosynth installed). It’s great to see the services from Microsoft Live Labs coming into a real product:

Developers will also be able to use the Photo Gallery API to add their applications into the Extras menu. Thanks to Scott's tip apparently Autocollage 2008 is also integrated into this Extras menu, provided you have it installed of course.

Conclusion

Overall, Photo Gallery had been a solid tool that does what it should do, and with additional features that helps you to better manage your photos and share them with the rest of the world. It is also great to see that Microsoft is progressively separating bundled applications such as Mail, Calendar, Movie Maker and Photo Gallery out of Windows, allowing additional flexibility in it’s feature set and a more focused development effort. The software, although still in beta stages, is quite stable and functional. However, it is quite disappointing that it doesn’t have the consistent look and feel with the other Wave 3 application – namely Messenger, which now even offers background themes customisation similar to the Wave 3 headers you seen in online services like Hotmail.

Read more LiveSide reviews on the new Windows Live betas:

Wave 3: Windows Live Mail - Calendar, Calendar, Calendar (and more)

Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look

Wave 3- Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

A picture is worth a thousand words: People Tags in Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 3

damaster — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 02:46:00 GMT

You've heard it at LiveSide (and LiveSino) first, that Windows Live Photo Gallery will feature facial recognition in its wave 3 release. Then we saw a mocked-up screenshot of how it may have looked like. Microsoft then helped us confirm it with their Windows Live Help entries. Today, you'll see here for the first time how it really looks like. Enough words said, we'll get straight to the screenshot that will explain it all:

Notice on the left-hand pane it now shows two tagging sections, one for the new "People tags" and another for "Descriptive tags" which already exists in the current version. Expanding the "people tags" section will show a list of people you have ever tagged in your collection of photos in your Windows Live Contact list.

Similar to Facebook, you're now able to tag each person in your photos. What is different is that Photo Gallery will automatically detect faces in your photographs, allowing you to identify each person in the photos.

It also seemed like Google had beaten Microsoft to the race by releasing name taggings features in Picasa Web Albums too. Microsoft, the race is on!

Update: Seems like when you expand the "People tags" section, it will display the list of contacts from your Messenger contact list, including your favourite contacts. Also, from the screenshot below we can see that you're able to view those photos shared by your Messenger contacts using the PhotoShare function. That is some good integration across Windows Live services.

Windows Live Help confirms Wave 3 features in Mail, Photo Gallery and Toolbar

damaster — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:18:00 GMT

Our friend Picturepan2 at LiveSino has again done some more investigative reporting in Windows Live Help revealing and confirming Wave 3 features in Mail, Photo Gallery and Toolbar. Here's a summary of what's discovered:

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Add people tags (Textual data attached to a photo to refine its definition and meaning by identifying the person or persons in the photo. You can sort your photos according to what people tags they have, making it easier to find photos of your friends and family.) to your photos to make sorting and finding photos of your friends and family easier. You can create people tags and add them to your photos at any time.
Windows Live Mail

Calendars: You can create calendars and events whether you're signed in to Windows Live Mail or not. However, if you do sign in, any calendars that you’ve created in Windows Live Calendar Beta are automatically imported into Windows Live Mail, and changes that you make in either Windows Live Mail or Windows Live Calendar Beta are reflected in the other. Also, your calendars are available from any computer on which you sign in to Windows Live Mail. If you don't sign in, you can access your calendars only from the computer on which you created them. For more information, see About calendars.

You can also update when events occur and schedule events to occur regularly over a period of days, weeks, months, or years. If you sign in to Windows Live Mail with your Windows Live ID, Windows Live Mail can send you reminders (A scheduled message that Windows Live Mail sends to you to remind you that an event in your calendar is about to occur) before each event starts to help ensure that you never miss an event.

It even reveals the little Calendar icon that's going to appear in Windows Live Mail:
Windows Live Toolbar

Windows Live Calendar Beta is a free online calendar program that you can use to keep track of personal appointments, family get-togethers, group schedules, birthdays, holidays, and other events. When you're signed in with your Windows Live ID, you can always see a summary of your calendar on Windows Live Toolbar Beta, and the Calendar Beta website is just a click away.

Looks like Microsoft is revealing more and more about what's coming up in Windows Live Wave 3. Stay tuned as we continue updating you on what's coming.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Will Soon Recognize Faces In Pictures

Sunshine — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:40:00 GMT

Digital Inspiration unveils a little bit about the face recognition in the upcoming Windows Live Photo Gallery:

Imagine this. You connect a digital camera to your PC for transferring photos and the software is able to recognize family members and friends in the photos by their faces.

(Clarification update: the photo below was created by Digital Inspiration from a photo from Riya Visual Search, and the current version of WL Photo Gallery, for illustration purposes. Digital Inspiration has updated their post to reflect this, at our request)

Well that’s something new coming in the new release of Windows Live Photo Gallery - it will include a special "Face Recognition" feature where the software will automatically recognize different faces in in your personal pictures and will also let you add those names as tags.

Don’t know how they know but they also manage to tell that the first beta is expected sometime in September. We’ll be on the look out!

Thanks Picturepan2 from LiveSino, for tipping us on this one.

More information on Windows Live Wave 3

damaster — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:29:00 GMT

Mary Jo Foley recently reported on her blog that Windows Live Wave 3 have completed the M1 (Milestone 1) stage. Our friend Picturepan2 over at LiveSino was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to interview a manager for Windows Live chatting about the progress of Windows Live Wave 3. Although there were many interesting details that he wasn't allowed to disclose, here's a quick summary of what's currently going on in Microsoft with Windows Live:

New Unified Header - as we've reported previously, all online Windows Live services upon release will have the brand new header that allows users to change the background and colour themes of their pages. This is aimed to reduce the branding confusion that we've had with Windows Live previously.

Windows Live Hotmail - this has recently completed its M2 (Milestone 2) stage. The new version concentrates on extra integration with other Windows Live services such as SkyDrive and Home, as well as a new service People (will this replace Contacts? or perhaps has something to do with the C2 project at Microsoft Research?)
Windows Live Messenger - M1 build is now complete, and is currently in development for the M2 stage. Messenger 9 will feature a new look as well as additional new features (that we're not allowed to disclose yet )
Windows Live Mail - some minor improvements and interface changes in the M1 build. With the recent release of Outlook Connector 12.1 with Windows Live Calendar support, the new Windows Live Mail will also feature Calendar syncing.
Windows Live Photo Gallery - the main new feature in the current M1 build is facial recognition. Photo Gallery will automatically recognise people's faces in your photos, and users will be able to add tags to each person (similar to how Facebook photos works by tagging each person). However, these added people tags will only be viewable in Photo Gallery.

Currently these are the only set of features we are allowed to disclose. There are no mentions of the new Windows Live Movie Maker application nor any details on the new Windows Live People and Windows Live Groups services. But stay tuned as we'll keep you updated with the latest news in the development of Windows Live Wave 3.