In previous posts we’ve talked about the new publish options available from the Live Photo Gallery.  In addition to being able to publish, there are many cases where it’s nice to be able to get images out of album and into your local gallery.  Live Spaces offers two ways to download photos from an album.  The first way is to download a single photo at a time.  This is useful if you just want one photo from an album.  In addition to the ability to download a single photo, we’ve also added a new feature which enables you to download an entire album from any space at once.  This feature makes it easy to grab the high-res images you want from any album you have permissions too.

 
At the top of each Live Spaces album you will see a button for “Download photo” and “Download album”.  Clicking “Download photo” will save the current photo.  Clicking “Download album” will bring up a view which you can use to select what photos you want to download.

 
From here you can decide what photos from this album you want to download to your local machine.  By default, the images are stored under your “My pictures” folder, in a folder named “Downloaded Albums” with subfolders for the space and album name.  But you can configure where and how you want the images saved under the “More options” link.  Clicking download starts copying each file from the space to your local machine.

 
When the download is completed, the Live Photo Gallery is launched so you can enjoy the photos.

 
Couple of things you’ll want to be aware of when playing with this feature:

• Spaces downsamples images that are larger than 1600x1600, so their longest dimension is 1600.  We will always download the largest image stored on spaces, but the max size will be 1600x1600.
• Spaces hasn’t always stored highres images – The highres support is new, so if you are downloading an old album spaces won’t have a highres image available.  You’ll still get the biggest one we have stored.
• It’s a beta and we have a bug to fix…  In order to play with this feature in the beta you’ll want to publish from the Live Photo Gallery client.  If you use the Live Spaces album upload web page, the “Download album” link will only get the 400x400 version.  But we’ll have this fixed before we ship.

Enjoy!  As always, we sincerely appreciate your feedback. Let us know how we are doing.

-John Thornton (Program Manager)