Entries tagged with windows live photo gallery - Channel 10

Panoramic Stitches from the Pacific Northwest

Sarah Perez — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Brandon LeBlanc just posted some great panoramic stitches on the Windows Vista Experience blog. If you haven't yet seen what Windows Live Photo Gallery can do, you should check these out. From his recent trip around Washington state, including Seattle, Snoqualmie Pass, Grand Coulee Dam, and the Tri-Cities area, Brandon ported his Dell XPS M1530 (PRODUCT) RED laptop and his digital camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XTi. To check out the images for yourself, head over to the blog where you can see the complete set.

Metadata and the Windows Live Photo Gallery

Sarah Perez — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Metadata means "data about data" and every time you tag a photo, give it a star rating, or edit the time it was taken, you've edited the metadata. In Windows XP, photo metadata included things like file name, size, and type, etc. In Windows Vista, however, there is all kinds of new metadata, including tags, date taken, rating, caption, image resolution, camera make/model, shutter speed, etc. Now, some of that metadata is created by your camera (like make/model, shutter speed, etc), but some of it is created by you.

With the Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can quickly and easily add tags and ratings. If this is the first time you've installed the program, you will probably want to go through the pictures already on your computer and add some tags to them. This can be easily done by clicking on the group of photos listed under the Tags section as "Not Tagged." You can then select a picture, or use Ctrl or Shift to select multiple photos and then "Add Tags" on the right side of the gallery. As you add tags to photos, your most recent tags will appear as you start typing in a tag, making it that much easier to tag a photo. The next time you import pictures, you can tag them on their way in - there are more details on the import process here.

In the Live Photo Gallery, you can also click on the star ratings, which are located above the tags in the right side column in the gallery to assign ratings to your photos. At the bottom right there is an option to add a caption to the selected photo.

But what you may not realize is that the tags you assign to your photos don't just help you locate and organize the pictures on your computer, the data is passed on to other services that support the metadata, too. A good example of this is flickr. By right-clicking on a photo or photos in the gallery, you'll see a "More Services" option. Click that and select "Publish on flickr." When you publish your photos on flickr, your tags and captions are supported and will be transferred automatically to Flickr, saving you from having to tag them again on the web service. But flickr isn't the only thing that supports the Photo Gallery Metadata. Since Windows Live Photo Gallery supports a type of metadata called XMP, programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, iView MediaPro, Extensis Portfolio, and lots more support XMP, too.

Professional photographers may want to have even more interaction with the metadata, so for them, there is the Microsoft Photo Info tool. The tool is a software add-in for Windows that allows you to add, change, or delete metadata properties from inside Windows Explorer. It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photos in the Windows Explorer Details view.

Using the Microsoft Photo Info tool, you can edit images individually, or as a collection, quickly recall recent entries and location details, generate copyright notices automatically, correct EXIF capture date/time info, view EXIF properties, and preview images by double-clicking the photo's thumbnail.

(Source: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)

Jon Udell talks HD Photo with Bill Crow

Larry Larsen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:21:00 GMT

Did you know that many cameras can take better photos than the jpeg standard can display? This means that the camera is often trying to figure out which ball to drop in terms of how to save the photo and therefore limits you in the color correction you can make after taking the picture. Raw has been one way around this problem, another is Microsoft's new HD Photo format.

You may think that you need some expensive or proprietary software to use this new format - not so. You can get started using HD Photo using Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free download. Check out this screencast of Jon Udell talking to Bill Crow about how simple it is for "happy snappers" to easily adjust photo attributes using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Innovation Day - HDView

Lori Grosland — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:27:00 GMT

At Innovation Day in Brussels, I spoke with two very cool guys from MS Research in Redmond, Bryan Ressler and Matt Uyttendaele. They filled me in on HD View and how to create my own HD View images using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

HD View is a new technology developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media Group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images. And by very large images, they mean billions of pixels (Gigapixels)! It is a browser plug-in that enables you to pan back and forth or up and down and to zoom in or out to examine an area of interest in the very large images while still maintaining the high resolution details. The new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery has a new image stitching component that allows you to select a group of photos that have some overlap and the result is a panoramic view photo.

Check out the HD View team’s blog for more details…http://hdview.spaces.live.com

Flickr, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Tags!

Nick Hodge — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:24:00 GMT

As Larry mentions in his post, the latest beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery is out.

After installing it, the first feature I tried out is the new "upload to Flickr". I am a Flickr Pro user: the ability to see and comment on my friend's photos is like attending slide-show evenings from the comfort of your own computer.

Windows Vista added support for tagging photos as another mechanism for organising your digital memories. Windows Live Photo Gallery reflects these tags when upload into Flickr. Now as a Flickr user, this was a wow! moment.

Watch and listen to my (first) screencast.

Windows Live Photo Gallery includes Flickr!

Larry Larsen — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:32:00 GMT

Every so often something hits at Microsoft that is so cool you find your inbox filling up about it late into the night as we all start playing with it. It happened this week with the integration of Flickr into Windows Live Photo Gallery. With the latest version, available now on Microsoft Update, uploading your photos to Flickr is as easy as clicking the publish button or just right clicking on your photos. The best part; all the tagging you've done in Vista carries through to Flickr so there is no need to have to re-tag your photos!

Stay tuned as later this week you'll see how easy it is to include these Flickr photos on your site using the drag and drop development tool PopFly.

To get this new version of Photo Gallery, click over to http://get.live.com and get Beta 2 of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and then to http://update.microsoft.com to get the latest version. Check out the press release here, the Windows Live Photo Gallery blog here, and the Flickr blog here. And don't forget to check out Jeff Sandquist's post about it.