Entries tagged with windows live photo gallery - Channel 10

Photosynth + Windows Live Photo Gallery

sarahintampa — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Martha Rotter recently discovered a nifty feature in the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery. Apparently, if you have the Photosynth software installed on your PC, the first option under the new “Extras” menu in Photo Gallery will be “Create a Photosynth.” Once selected, you can then just navigate through your photo collections within Photo Gallery to locate and select the photos you want to be a part of the synth. After you have all the photos selected, you can just create a photosynth from right there in Photo Gallery. That’s some nice integration!

If you haven’t tried Photosynth yet, give it a shot! This amazing application lets you stitch your pics together to create panoramic images like you wouldn’t believe. Laura has a great instructional video to help you get started: check it out.

Checking Out Windows Live Photo Gallery

sarahintampa — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:03:00 GMT

In the recently updated collection of tools from Windows Live, one of the apps which received a makeover is Windows Live Photo Gallery. This weekend I finally had the opportunity to play around with the new service, and I must admit I really love it. The first thing I noticed right away is that the UI had a makeover. The toolbar is now white and some of the buttons that used to be up top (rotate and delete) are now down in the bottom right, leaving room for more menu options instead (File, Fix, Info, Publish, Email, Print, Make, Slideshow, and Extras). However, although there are new menus and options available, the overall feel is one of being better organized and simpler to use.

The most exciting new addition to Live Photo Gallery is facial recognition. Of course I had to check this feature out right away. Now when you’re viewing a photo, Live Photo Gallery recognizes the people in the photo and draws a box around their face so you can identify them with the new “people tags.” What’s really clever about this new feature is the way it integrates with Windows Live Messenger. If you’re signed into Live Messenger, you can scroll through your Live Messenger contact list, which appears as a drop-down next to the person’s face when clicked. You can select their name from the list that appears. If your contact list is long, you can also search the list just by typing in the search box at the top. If the person in the photo isn’t in your contacts, I found the easiest way to identify them is to just type their name into the search box anyway and then click the “add new person” option. This adds them to your list of people to choose from in the future.

You can also identify people quickly just by selecting the pictures that they’re in and clicking "add a people tag." Since I was already so organized as to have a whole set of photos in a folder with the person’s name (I know, that's crazy!) I was able to select “Ctrl” + “A” to select all photos of a person and then add the people tag to all the photos at once.

From Live Photo Gallery, you can share photos directly on the Windows Live Photos web site (part of Windows Live Spaces). If any of your contacts have photos shared publicly, you will see them within Windows Live Photos and you can even download them into your own albums if you so desire.

In addition to publishing on Windows Live Photos, you can also publish photos to Flickr, or any other web sites that offer a plugin (more on that later) via the “more services” option from the right-click menu.

Overall, the new software offers a much-improved update to the older version of Live Photo Gallery and is definitely worth the upgrade. You can get this and all the Windows Live updates from download.live.com.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Will Recognize Faces

sarahintampa — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

As part of the Windows Live Wave 3, the next refresh of the Windows Live Services due out later this summer, the Windows Live Photo Gallery will offer a new version of their software – one that will automatically identify faces! The faces in the photos will be able to be identified with tags, which will make the whole tagging process a lot easier to do – since the software will do it for you. We can’t wait to get our hands on this one! The next release of Live will also be “taking advantage of the profile concept with Live,” according to Brian Hall, General Manager of Windows Live as reported by ZDNet. The private beta of Windows Live will launch this summer.

ShutterSpeed Episode 02

Nic — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:31:00 GMT

Welcome to ShutterSpeed Episode 02

My guests in the studio: Michael Palermiti, Bill Crow & Jeff Greene.

Links mentioned and topics covered in this episode:
[01:29] Photosynth on CSI: New York (YT Clip)
[05:22] Top 100 Iconic Photo Locations of the World - Contest
[09:46] Microsoft Pro Photo Tools with Geotagging (free download)
[16:56] What is Metadata and why is it important for photography?
[17:50] Hands-On: Using (the free) Windows Live Photo Gallery to import digital photos directly from the camera, add tags and look at basic automatic adjustment options such as brightness, contrast, saturation, red eye removal, curves and cropping.
[38:15] The first photo Bill Crow ever took; an early example of metadata from the 60's

On the next episode of ShutterSpeed Art Wolfe gives us a tour of his Seattle gallery and talks about the stories and technical challenges behind some of his favourite photos. Stay tuned.

Feedback? Comments? Suggestions? Please let us know via the comments section below or email 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

sarahintampa — 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 — 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

lorigros — 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!

nhodge — 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 — 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.