We didn’t do much to the Slideshow feature in the Windows Live Photo Gallery, but there have been several questions coming in about this feature, so we thought that it was worth a brief rundown of what’s changed.

In a nutshell, here’s how the slideshow feature works in this release:

• XP users: Basic slideshow only (equivalent to the ‘Classic’ theme on Vista). No transitions, and no support for videos. The rich themes are very dependent on the Vista graphics model, so it will take a fair amount of work to get the rich themes working on XP (more than we could bite off for this release).
• Vista users (basic graphics hardware): The experience should be unchanged from Vista. You may see a limited set of themes available, and may or may not see transport controls depending on the capabilities of your graphics card.
• Vista users (premium graphics hardware): The experience should be unchanged from Vista.

We blogged about the Vista Slideshow experience previously. Most of this still applies (with the exception of the above notes). One exception is that although the rich themes were only available on certain Vista SKUs, all themes are available in all Vista SKUs (again, depending on your graphics hardware).

- Bret Ahlstrom (Program Manager)