LiveSide - News blog : Windows Live Photos

Windows Live Photos integrates with FrameIt

damaster — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:09:53 GMT

We told you it was coming the last time we told you about the new Windows Live FrameIt, and we’ve seen FrameIt integrated with Facebook already. This time it’s Microsoft’s very own service that gets the integration – yes you heard it right you are now able to import your Windows Live Photos albums straight into your FrameIt collections!

As you’re signed in to your Windows Live ID, you’ll be able to add Windows Live Photos as one of the sources into your FrameIt collection. As shown above, FrameIt will pull a list of all your public albums from your Windows Live Photos for you to add to your collection and share it on a FrameIt-enabled photo frame.

Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns, you won’t be able to add any of your privately shared (or private) Photos albums and share them with your friends. This is particularly strange though as the integration with Facebook actually allow you to display your private photo albums (or photos tagged of you) on Facebook to a public FrameIt collection, of course, that is after you’ve authorized FrameIt to do so through Facebook Connect.

It is great to see more and more integration between Windows Live services (I hope to see FrameIt appearing on the header menus soon). What’s coming next? I hope it’ll be Flickr and Live Mesh integration. We’ll just have to wait and see as Microsoft rolls out more features to its new FrameIt service.

Visit Windows Live FrameIt here: http://frameit.live.com

A note about Hotmail, SkyDrive and Photos storage space

damaster — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

In our previous posts covering the upcoming features in Hotmail and SkyDrive, we seemed to have missed some hints at possible Hotmail and SkyDrive integration. People have been asking for this for a long time, and now it finally seems possible in Wave 3. In the latest Windows Live documentations, it mentioned several details about the storage spaces that are available throughout Windows Live services:

Hotmail's minimum storage space will be 25GB and this will be ever-increasing as required at the end of each month, making it basically unlimited storage (subject to abuse control)
The ability to download e-mail attachments from Hotmail into SkyDrive - allowing these attachments to be shared with others or just kept private in your online folders
SkyDrive's storage space will also be 25GB, as reported previously, in addition to Hotmail's storage space
SkyDrive will allow uploading of up to 1000 new files stored per month - note that this only applies to newly uploaded files during that particular month, so total storage can well exceed 1000 files (it is unsure whether this also applies to Photos and those Hotmail e-mail attachments downloaded into SkyDrive)
Photos will utilize SkyDrive’s ~~5GB~~ 25GB of storage space for storage of full resolution photos. ~~(However this may be subject to change - at least we certainly hope so. Perhaps someone forgot to update it in the documentations?)~~ Update: From one of the demonstration videos by Brian Hall, it was shown that Photos does have the 25GB of storage shared with SkyDrive, not the previously reported 5GB. Looks like it was a typo in the documentations after all. Thanks to CKurt for pointing it out in the comments!

For many users, these storage spaces should be well enough for us to share files and photos with our family, friends, or colleagues. ~~Although we do hope that Photos can take advantage of the entire 25GB in SkyDrive instead of the reported 5GB.~~ What are your thoughts on this?

Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:38:11 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing an interesting referrer popping up in the stats for some of our posts. Turns out Microsoft moved their Wave 3 services from the dogfood servers onto beta servers, and as a result some MSFT employees were clicking through to us from http://home-beta.live.com. You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.

Note – as the new sites are locked down, these are just features we’ve spotted/inferred from looking around the existing sites that are running side-by-side. What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.

Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.

Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.

Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)

Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.

And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:

Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)

Let us know if you find anything: tips [at] liveside d0t net

Wave 3 urls start resolving, services betas coming soon

Chris — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:41:00 GMT

Ah its almost that time of the year, when we start posting 5 times a day with more screenshots than you can shake a stick at. Just to wet the appetite, the url for the Windows Live People service now works (people.live.com). Unfortunately if you’re not on the Hotmail dogfood servers, all you’ll see is your Hotmail inbox. Yes there is a Wave 3 Hotmail update, which should please a lot of people :)

Also of note is that profile.live.com now redirects to Spaces (photos.live.com has done for a few releases now).

One final point to make, is that if you signed into Windows Live Video Messages to try it out, you’ll have broken your Windows Live Calendar. If you try and sign in now, you’ll see an error message: “Windows Live Calendar wasn’t able to complete this request.” We’ve heard that it is a known issue, so it should get fixed in the near future. Maybe at the same time as a Wave 3 calendar update? ;)

Anyway, if you have any tips over the next month or so remember we have a dedicated tips line: tips [at] liveside dot net.

Fun times ahead!