Windows Live Photo & Video Blog

Can you tell me where I can get a background image of the Windows logo that was on the TV monitor behind you guys?

I thought the Windows logo actually looked kind of cool with that thing surrounding it.

Why doesn't Windows Live Photo Gallery *YET* have a plugin API. All Windows Live desktop apps, Toolbar, Messenger, Live Writer have plugin support. Apps like iPhoto, ACDSee, Picasa all have plugin support. Please add this critically missing feature to WLPG in Wave 3. :)

I hear all kinds of rumors about a new spin of WLPG, including face detection/recog, but this blog has been silent for the last 3 months. Did I miss something and should we look at other places for official news re WLPG?

Anyway, the following is a list of annoyances I have with WLPG. I hope these will be addressed in the new version.

* I cannot import photos from a network share

* I cannot import photos from an external HDD

(Both these issues matter because without import, the rotation information embedded in the photos is ignored by WLPG)

* The slideshow (and the screensaver from Vista) lowers resolution to something non-native for my LCD. Worse, it forgets the aspect ratio of the display.

* When organising tags, there is no auto-scrolling available. So if I want to move "Amsterdam" to "Places", I cannot simply drag "Amsterdam" to "Places" since Places is outside the screen. Instead, I have to drag "Amsterdam" to e.g. "Mont Blanc", and then scroll the taglist down, and then move "Amsterdam" to "Places" to create the Places/Amsterdam tags I have wanted to create all along.

* There is no way to select starred photos, like in WPG. I still use WPG just for that purpose. I really miss that feature...

* My camera spits out both CR2 (RAW) files and JPGs. These show up as doubles in WLPG. It would be really cool if WLPG would recognise these as doubles (having the same datetimetaken field and coming from the same camera) and show only the best quality version. Of course, tagging applied to one of them should be automatically applied to the other file as well ;-)