Windows Live Photo & Video Blog

John,

Thank you for a great show and a great product. Since adopting Photo Gallery Beta, I've barely used my new ACDSee Pro 2 and Elements 6. Photo Gallery Beta does most of what I want and does it very well.

I like this product a lot. When you have a lot of photos, I have found that the tagging them is the best way to organize them.

I love the Library program in the Microsoft Digital Image Suite product and the way that tags works. Now when that product has been discontinued, I am considering what to use instead and I have been looking at Live Photo Gallery. It has a similiar approach, but finding photos by using the tags does not work at all well in Live Photo Gallery. The problem is when you select multiple tags. In Live Photo Gallery, all the photos that have any of the tags are displayed. This is typically not what you want. If you select the tags "Holiday" and "Thomas" you typically want to see all holiday photos showing Thomas. Not all holiday photos plus all photos of Thomas.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite Library handles this very well and I wish that the team of Live Photo Gallery could take a look at that product and learn from it.

BTW, where did the Rating tags go? How can you filter on Rating?

Regarding finding photos, you've got 1 more competitor at http://www.getphotology.com/.

WLPG has become my most used app! Can't wait until the next update! What happened to searching by ratings? It would be also nice to be able to add/edit the IPTC/XMP Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields to the Photos (like MS Photo Info does) and a feature similar to the “Place Finder” in MS Expression Media to be able to search photos by geographical location.

How about being able to publish photos to facebook? That would be amazing.

Have you heard of Fitt's law? Why doesn't you application follow the Fitt's law when all Windows apps do including ones from Microsoft?

I was wondering if we're going to see some YouTube integration considering we have Flickr integration. Soapbox is all well and good, but I already have an account on YouTube, so ideally I'd like to be able to publish there.

Also, any chance we'll see some integration with MovieMaker?

I just installed it and it looks nice. One thing that really bugs me is that you can add a folder in the gallery but if you want to remove a subfolder of it you cant! This is something that seems very simple to implement and it would be very useful.

Also you have only two ways to view the photos in the gallery. Thumbnail view and detailed view right? How about having a half way mode which is like thumbnail view but with just the name of the photo underneath. I have a few edited photos (like resized or croped etc) that i'd like to tell apart from the originals but i like the thumbnail view that displays a lot of them too. Another easy thing to do as well.

Anyway keep up updating and this should be a great little app.

Can someone please explain how this differs from Windows Gallery?

Thanks for using our product and taking the time to send us feedback.  

@ga41

Removing a sub folder is indeed something that would be useful in many cases.  We have looked at doing it in the past but it's surprisingly complicated to implement in our current architecture.  That’s not to say that we will never do it, it just wasn’t something we could fit into this release.

Regarding seeing just filenames – we have that view and many others.  You can click on the “name” sort to get that view or if you right click on the white area behind the thumbnails you can pull up a context menu with lots of different views.

@someone

Can you tell me more about what part of the application is troubling you?

@ Lorencm20

@widewakewesley

Great suggestions.  We are listening to our customers and it’s clear these are choices they want.  Thanks for this input.

Enjoy!

- John Thornton

There are three possible sources of meta information about a photograph: EXIF tags (in particular, Author and ImageDescription and DateCreated), file name and date, Office properties (Title, Author, Keywords, Comments — as seen in Windows Explorer) and Gallery properties (e.g. caption).  Of those, EXIF tags are most reliable (because it is hardest to change them inadvertently, and, moreover, they get transmitted with the image file without any additional protocol).  I am pretty sure some of this information is going to be inconsistent because you have to store the same information in three different places.  Is there a way to synchronize them?  I have also noticed that Gallery changes the Software EXIF tag to itself after enhancing the image; I wonder whether this is appropriate.