Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

re: Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

pearljam — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:18:22 GMT

Hi there

I just installed and used Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta yesterday. I had a few comments and I thought I should share those with you

1. The installation seems to take an inordinate amount of time. I do know that I did not install on the fastest of machines, but still the installation took around 30 minutes

2. I have a network share mapped as a drive. This network share holds all my pictures. However when I tried to add the mapped folder, I got an error that the folder could not be added. I managed to add the folder by browsing to the network location.

3. I published some pictures to Live Spaces. While uploading I kept the Optimize option checked. Unfortunately the quality of pictures that got uploaded was very poor. If I switched to full-screen viewing mode, the pictures appeared very grainy.

Otherwise I quite like the product and was quite pleased that I could stitch pictures off the bat. Keep the good work coming.

re: Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

cjm55 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:32:40 GMT

I've been looking forward to this application for a long time and I'm really rather impressed with it so far, having been running on Vista Ultimate at home as soon as it was available.

I've a few comments I'd also like to share:

1) The panoramic stitching is quite amazing but I have found that it's sometimes necessary to iterate the creation of panoramas by manually adjust the photos that are used for the composition in order to avoid getting banding where one photo has a slightly different color cast. Would you consider adding an interactive version of the panorama such that the generated image can be modified in terms of its constituent parts? I presume that you internally still maintain enough state to know which pixels relate to which image, even after the various distortions that are applied.

2) Is there/Will there be an SDK or will I be able to add in support for publishing images on to Facebook? I would use my Live space more but I'm still waiting for the 60 day transition to move the old space name to my new Windows Live ID :-(

3) Are you planning on adding more tools in the same expander control area as the Sharpen tool?

4) There seem to be a couple of issues with memory consumption and performance (it is a beta after all) when viewing panoramic images - although the filesize was only 5 MB after stitching, attempting to save an update to the file after performing a fix to the colors left one of my CPU cores at 50% for over a minute with 300 MB of RAM allocated...

5) Any chance of seeing you add in some of the work from Microsoft Research's GroupShot application? It would be awesome to be able to harness those snazzy graphcutting algorithms to make better composites out of various snaps of people from parties such that everyone in the shot has their eyes open!

Please keep up the great work - I'd love to be working on a product that's this good ;-)

Chris

re: Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

pixblog — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:53:34 GMT

pearljam - thanks for the comments (love your band btw!)

Can you log the issues over on http://feedback.live.com/ for the problems that you have run into? This will help our team follow up with you to get all of the info they need to fix the problems.

1) After logging the issue, you may be asked to attach log files from the installer to help us troubleshoot

2) Were you blocked from adding the folder? We *warn* users from adding an entire drive (due to potential perf issues), but you *should* be able to continue. A mapped drive might cause you to run into this, but it sounds like you also found a workaround.

3) Do you know what the resolution of your images are? If they are less than 1600x1600, they may appear grainy simply because they are low resolution. If you uploaded high-resolution photos and they still look grainy, please log the issue and include a link to the album so we can investigate

Thanks!

re: Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

pixblog — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:04:01 GMT

Chris (cjm55) - thanks for all of the questions, I'll try to answer them as best as I can

1) We'll be posting more details on the panoramic stitching feature soon (shooting for next week). I don't believe that you'll have the level of control that you're looking for in this release, but I'll let Karthik (the owner of this feature) speak to that in his post.

I've found that I get the best stitch results when I adjust the individual photos to match as closely as possible before I start the stitch. Also, using something like a circular polarizer can make the banding you refer to even worse, so I try not to shoot panorama photos when I'm using a polarizer.

2) I don't beleive that we will be offering an SDK in this release, but rest assured that we do want to support publishing to sites other than spaces. We know that there are a ton of other sites that users want to publish to.

3) I think that it's safe to say that we haven't exhausted all photo editing features yet. I can't say what features we'll add when, but I don't think that we're done yet

4) Can you log this issue on http://feedback.live.com/? You may be asked to attach the files so we can investigate further

5) I can't say what features we'll add when, but I would love to see this feature integrated into the Photo Gallery as well!

Thanks for all of your great questions and feedback!