Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Flickr

ShutterSpeed - Episode #1 is now posted!

pixblog — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:20:17 GMT

ShutterSpeed is a brand new photography show for photo enthusiasts. In this first episode, Nic Fillingham (host) teams up with a panel of company photography experts: Tim Grey, Bill Crow, and myself. We got together in Channel 10's studio to discuss online video storage and photo editing tools. We also get back to basics and talk about the principles of photography and what to look for in a digital camera. The final segment of the premiere show Nic visits the Seattle studio of Phil Borges, a Microsoft Icon of Imaging.

We hope to make ShutterSpeed a regular series on Channel 10. For comments on the program or ideas and suggestions for future episodes please email us at shutterspeed@on10.net.

ShutterSpeed Episode 01

If you want to watch a high res version or download it to your favorite device, you can! iPod (MP4) | MP3 | PSP (MP4) | WMA | WMV | WMV (High) | Zune

Look for episode 2 coming soon!

- Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)

Make your Windows Live contacts also your Flickr friends

pixblog — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:26:40 GMT

Flickr recently implemented the Windows Live Contacts API in their friend finder. That means in just a couple clicks you can make all your Windows Live contacts Flickr friends too! I’ve used Flickr for a while now as one of my ways to share photos, but throughout that time I’ve only acquired a couple friends on their service. I would add someone if I happened to notice they also shared on Flickr but I never felt compelled to recreate my social network on their site. It just seemed like a bunch of busy work.

Yesterday I saw a couple posts here and here and thought I should go try the Flickr Friend Finder service out. I was amazed that I had over 40 Windows Live contacts using Flickr that I had never known about before. The service also supports gathering your Gmail and Yahoo contacts. So if your one of the many folks out there using the Windows Live Photo Gallery to publish to Flickr I suggest you try out this new Flickr feature. It’s a great use of the Live Contacts API. Well done, Flickr.

John Thornton (Program Manager)

Sharing your photos on Flickr is seamless with Windows Live Photo Gallery

pixblog — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:11:00 GMT

In my previous post I announced that we partnered up with the Flickr team on a slick new publishing feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Our friends at Flickr also talked about it on their team blog. This time I’d like to take a few more moments and go a little deeper into some of the details of the new feature and I created a short screencast to show how simple it really is!

First, we absolutely still believe that “the truth is in the file”. As Scott Dart (Program Manager) put it in a previous post, “That means that metadata you apply to your photos is part of the photo, and available to any application that knows how to read it.” We carried that forward to Windows Live Photo Gallery and the publish features, both Publish on Windows Live Spaces and Publish on Flickr. We knew this was important to Flickr users so we made sure the feature didn’t remove that important data from your photos when you uploaded them to your account. (Got more questions about metadata? We have answers, here.)

Talking about is OK, but how about seeing it in action?! Check out the screencast I made showing how smooth the flow is from Importing your photos off your camera to the photos being published on your Flickr page!

Video: Demo: Windows Live Photo Gallery - Publish on Flickr

By the way, I published my .WMV on Soapbox using Windows Live Photo Gallery! ;-)

For those that like screen shots, here’s the play by play: If you’ve never used the Publish on Flickr feature, the first time you go to click on it in the Publish menu you’ll find it in the “More services” fly out. The next time you return to the Publish menu, we’ll display it on the top level making it even easier for you to re-use it.

After you click on the Publish on Flickr menu item for the first time, you’ll be asked to authorize Windows Live Photo Gallery. Authorizing Photo Gallery simply means you allow it to access your account and upload photos to it. You will only be asked to authorize each account once (per PC) and then you won’t have to bother again!

Clicking “Authorize…” on the above dialog will automatically open your web browser to the Flickr website where you’ll need to confirm whether you’ll allow the application to have access. I’m assuming you will approve, or else no worky-worky for the Publish on Flickr feature! ;-) If it makes you feel better, Windows Live Photo Gallery is a trusted Flickr partner:

After authorizing the application on the Flickr site, you can close the web browser and return to Windows Live Photo Gallery to this dialog:

Authorization is done! Clicking Next, gets you to the Publish dialog. On the Publish dialog you can add or switch between multiple Flickr accounts, choose which set you want to upload to or create a new one, select a resize option if you don’t want to upload the original, and you can select the permission for your photos when they are published:

Assuming you click the Publish button, you’ll start uploading photos… (*Power user tip* You can minimize the upload dialog and go on to other tasks, or queue up more photos to publish… queue up as many as you like!)

After the upload finishes we’ll let you know with a summary dialog and provide a one-click “View photos” option to quickly get to your newly published photos on Flickr…

So, there you have it. What do you think? We want to hear your feedback! Thanks!

- Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)

Do you use Flickr? Then check out Windows Live Photo Gallery (Beta)!

pixblog — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:40:00 GMT

To all of those that asked for it on your own blog, posted comments on our blog or other blog postings, sent us email, or even stopped me on the streets (ok, maybe it hasn’t gone this far yet) asking us to enable Windows Live Photo Gallery to publish photos on Flickr, I want to say… We heard you and we’ve done something about it!

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve added the option to publish your photos on Flickr in the latest beta refresh version available today via Microsoft Update! In fact, Windows Live Photo Gallery has received the stamp of approval from the super cool people at Flickr as a first-class application for uploading your photos to your Flickr account! You can find the new option on the Publish menu. I’ll be blogging more about the feature details very soon so check back here for lots more information. Check out the press release here.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to the brand new Publish on Flickr feature there are some other recent notable changes in this latest beta version:

Windows Live Photo Gallery no longer requires WDS (Windows Desktop Search) to be installed on XP! Again, we heard the grumblings loud and clear, and took action! Once you have installed the update via Microsoft Update and have build 1299.1010 install you can uninstall WDS if you’re not using it with any other programs.
Being a beta, we’ve also fixed a ton of bugs reported by users so the product should be a lot more stable since the last beta release.

Here’s how you get the latest Beta 2.2 refresh of Windows Live Photo Gallery: If you are already using the Windows Live Photo Gallery beta, you will get the beta refresh as an update from Microsoft Update. So, if you have automatic updates enabled from Microsoft Update you will get the latest version (Beta 2.2, build 1299.101) automatically. If you have automatic updates disabled you will need to go to Microsoft Update (http://update.microsoft.com) to get the latest.

Not running Windows Live Photo Gallery beta yet? Go to http://get.live.com to get the Beta 2 version and then check Microsoft Update to ensure you get the latest Beta 2.2 version with all of this new functionality announced today!

We hope you’re as excited as we are! We’re looking forward to hearing more of your feedback and experiences.

Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)