Along with Windows Live Writer Beta 3 there were a bunch of other tools released as part of the Windows Live Suite. It included
I have been using the Photo Gallery application from the past one week and looks like I have fallen for one more product from Microsoft.
Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta is a photo organizer that you can use to view, manage, and edit digital photos and videos. By default, all the photos in the Pictures folder on your hard disk appear in Photo Gallery. Additionally you can also add other folders on your hard disk to Photo Gallery Beta. You can also add photos to Photo Gallery Beta by importing them from a digital camera or memory card.
Photo gallery can quickly show you the photos based on date and you can also start tagging and rating your photos. Viewing photos is a treat using Photo gallery. The photo load speed is amazing and it reminded me of AcdSee ! The slider based zooming is another unique feature worth nothing
Other than simplifying viewing of photos, the gallery app also provides handy tools to fix/edit the photos.
The “Fix red eye” feature worked like a charm and I was able to give back the human look for some of the “monstrous” looking photos.
Other feature include:
- Printing/Ordering Prints (No service provider available in India)
- Creating panoramic photo
- Burning photos to CD
- Publishing photo to Windows Live spaces and videos to MSN Soapbox (Wish Flickr was also included !)
A must have tool for Windows !
Comments on this entry are closed.
I have been a staunch and regular user of Picasa well before Google set it’s eyes on it and quickly acquired it.
What you describe for Live Gallery is what Picasa has been doing for some time.
Even so, I will take a look at it and see if Live has anything on Picasa.
How is it better compared to Picasa? Any features that Picasa does not have?
Hi there! I’m a Program Manager on the Windows Live team that is building Windows Live Photo Gallery and updating the photos features on Spaces. Thanks for downloading and using the Beta! As you come across potential bugs or if you have suggestions, please drop us a line at our team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix. We’re listening to our customers!
Thanks!
Michael
RJ/Vasu,
I have used picasa in the past;for some reason I don’t like the tool. After seeing your comments, I downloaded picasa again. Here are my observations
1. Picasa loaded the images in My Docs/Pictures folder and it took more time compared to Live Gallery.
2. I don’t like the way it scrolls when I change between albums.
3. Picasa by default shows the image in a pretty cramped space, the left toolbar and the bottom box take bulk of the space.
4. No tagging/rating of photos (correct me if I have missed this feature – I did note that you could “star” a photo)
5. I totally don’t like the timeline feature. Not all user friendly. Photo gallery handles it better.
Please do try out Live gallery and let me know what you like and dislike in Photo gallery compared to Picasa.
Michael, thanks for noting my post. As I mentioned in the post, I was very much impressed by the “smoothness” of the app and also by the clean User Interface.
Here are some of my inputs:
1. I did try enhancing/fixing some of the photos and when I navigated to the next photo, it was saved automatically – There was no prompt by the application (Not sure if there is an option to disable this)
2. Like Live Writer, the tool should open up and allow third party developers to plug-in features. Especially for uploading/downloading/tagging of photos. I would love if Live Gallery integrated with Flickr (More so if it could synchronize the tags and captions). That would be a killer app since there are few/no powerful desktop clients for Flickr.
Hi Venu, I’m very happy you’ve found the app to be smooth and clean. Exactly the experience we’re hoping to capture this release.
To answer your question about the Saving functionality, unfortunately there is not a way of disabling that. This design is based on the Windows Photo Gallery in Vista and is closely tied with our Revert feature (which hasn’t changed much in Windows Live Photo Gallery). You can read more about the this in the original Vista blog post on our blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/07/26/679369.aspx
Thanks again,
Michael
Really acool application to work with
May become more popular that picasa
after few guys mentioned picassa, i did try it out and as of now I find WLPG simple/faster and meets all my requirements 🙂
Michael, I hope that you may be able to help me. I have installed Windows Live Photo Beta. I have had a problem with Burn data CD…….I have tried to burn to cd but was unsuccessful. My os is Windows XP home edition. Everything else works with Photo Gallery. I don’t understand why Burn data cd does not work….
Hopefully you can help!
Thank you.