Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Photo Gallery

Tree in the way? No problem!

pixblog — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:24:58 GMT

One of the cool things about panoramic stitching in Windows Live Photo Gallery is that you can use it to shoot around foreground objects.

Here’s an example from the Woodland Park Zoo where branches (and a fence) prevented me from getting a clean shot of two Zebras in a field. However, by repositioning my body for the source images (to shoot around branches) and later stitching the images together, I was able to easily get the image I wanted.

Here’s a diagram of how I shot through the trees:

Here are the three source images with the tree branches highlighted:

Here is the resulting stitch image. No branches! :)

To see a few other interesting uses of panoramic stitching, check out this blog post.

- Mike Morrison, Program Manager

Check out AutoCollage

pixblog — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:16:31 GMT

Hi, I’m JP Wollersheim. I’ve posted here before. My family takes tons of photos. One challenge we have is how to display multiple photos on one “canvas” to tell a story. There are great products in the market that tell a linear story like Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Photo Gallery screensaver, Windows Media Center, or Windows Live FrameIt. These products allow you to put together a set of photos and view separately in a linear fashion – one at a time.

There are times when you would like to see all your photos on the same screen or canvas as a collage. There are products to do that, however, typically they require a ton of work to look good. The example below took me about 25 minutes to create and it’s still not exactly what I was looking for. The square edges are a bit jarring, and it’s super difficult to get all of the photos in the template that I was given.

Microsoft Research solves problems like these so your photos really come to life. Our Cambridge Innovation Development team in Microsoft Research built AutoCollage (30-day free trial and If you like it, it’s only $14.95) which enables users to build a beautiful collage on seconds. Check out the difference using the exact same 12 photos:

Here’s how I did it:

1. Download AutoCollage

2. Start Windows Live Photo Gallery and find your photos you want to use. From Date taken (a) I selected July 2008, and (b) searched for “Lucy.” I then (c) organized by rating, and used all my 4 start photos. Here’s a trick: (d) Click on 4 star, it will select all of those photos – so you don’t have to select them one at a time.

3. Next, I launched AutoCollage by selecting Add to AutoCollage... from the Extras menu.

4. Photo Gallery launched the AutoCollage application with the photos I selected and had it do its magic. From the Options menu in AutoCollage I chose to make the finished composition the same size as my screen resolution so the correct aspect ratio and dimensions would be chosen and the finished photo would look good on my computer.

I used the slider to tell AutoCollage I wanted to use all 12 of the photos.

5. The final output looked like this.

6. Next I selected Desktop from the menu on the right and saved it as my desktop background. It was that easy!

- JP Wollersheim, Product Manager

Latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery fixes publishing issues

pixblog — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:16:05 GMT

We’ve been getting comments from users who’ve had issues uploading to existing albums, being confused about upgrading their albums, or not being able to share their original sized photos. Thanks for your feedback - we’ve fixed these problems! Here are the details:

Not able to see some of your online albums when trying to publish to them?

Don’t worry your albums and photos haven’t disappeared. They appear missing from the list when changes are made to your album (adding a photo, a comment, changing your display picture or your album permissions). Installing the latest version of Photo Gallery corrects this problem!

Only being able to upload 500 photos per month? Not anymore!

One of the great new things about publishing online albums now is that photos.live.com (where your photos are stored on Windows Live) no longer has that space limitation. Now you have 25 GB! For most of us, that’s enough storage for around 8,000 photos.

Selecting the “Optimize for printing” option resizes photos, but you want to share the original size.

In the latest version of Photo Gallery you can select the size you want to upload! Choose a smaller photo size for fast uploads, or if you want to upload the original size (which might take a little longer but might improve the quality of prints) you can - It’s your choice.

Being asked to upgrade your albums?

Photos uploaded through Windows Live Spaces and through the previous versions of Photo Gallery didn’t include cool stuff like ambient background colors on the slide show or the new square thumbnail images, so they need an extra step to make them look as nice as the new ones. Publishing photos with the latest version of Photo Gallery doesn’t require this extra step.

How I know if I have the new version of Photo Gallery or not?

It’s quick and easy to tell by looking at the Publish menu in Photo Gallery. If you see the option to Publish to Windows Live Spaces, you don’t have the latest version installed. You can also check on About Photo Gallery under the Help menu. Check to see if you have version 2009 (Build 14.0.8064.206). Or just install Photo Gallery. The install wizard will let you know if you already have the latest version installed or not.

We love your feedback. Besides commenting here you can ask questions on our public forum or send your feedback and issues directly to us.

- Ana Lilia Otero, Program Manager

Synchronize photos on two computers!

pixblog — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:13:47 GMT

You’ve tagged, edited, and organized your photos on your home computer. Your photo collection is perfect - just how you want it. But wait, there’s a problem. Your collection is perfect on your home computer, but you want your photos and videos on your laptop as well. Who wants to go through all that work again?

It'd be much easier if you could synchronize computers so that new photos on one computer were automatically copied to the other. Guess what? The Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Sync teams have partnered to make that possible!

With Sync, keeping photos synchronized on two computers is simple. Download and install Windows Live Essentials on two computers, launch Windows Live Photo Gallery on both and sign in on each using the same Windows Live ID. You’re on your way to synchronizing photos!

It gets better.

Say you edit a photo on your home computer that's synchronized with your laptop. Later, while looking at that photo on your laptop, you decide you don't like the edit you made and to want to revert back to the original. With Photo Gallery, you know that's possible, but you edited the photo on your other computer. With Sync, your photo's file history is also synchronized so you can undo changes you've made from either computer!

This is a new feature that we’re trying out with a limited number of people. If you can, try it out and let us know what you think. If you can't, hold on - you'll be able to soon!

—Photo Gallery and Sync teams

I'm a PC and I'm 4 1/2

pixblog — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:01:50 GMT

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet an super sparkly 4 ½ year old girl named Kylie. She was a fantastic little person who showed the world how to send an email of her sick fish, Dorothy, to her family. It is truly amazing to see how anybody – be it 4 or 90 – can easily use the amazing photo tools that the Windows Live team has built.

Last night on TV, her commercial was debuted. Check it out:

JP Wollersheim, Product Manager

Windows Live Essentials beta refreshed

pixblog — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:29:39 GMT

Repost from the Windows Live team blog…

About three months ago, we released public betas of the Windows Live Essentials – our suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.

Since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback and we’ve been using that information to update these programs. We’re getting very close to the final release. But before we get there, we’re refreshing the beta versions one more time to make sure we’ve ironed out all the kinks. You can get the latest betas from: http://download.live.com/.

We’re working hard to get the final versions ready to go as soon as possible. So let us know what you like and don’t like, and if you’re running into any issues that we need to take care of before we take the “beta” tags off.

We hope that you’ll find the latest versions even more enjoyable and useful than the first beta versions. Thank you all for the great feedback. Keep it coming!

- Digital Memories Experience team

New publish plug-ins available for Photo Gallery and Movie Maker!

pixblog — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:04:34 GMT

Do you share photos on Facebook? What about sharing sharing videos on YouTube? Well thanks to Will Duff, one of our developer interns this past summer, there are now a couple of brand new publish plug-ins for Facebook and YouTube available for download. Both plug-ins enable you to easily share your photos or videos with just a few clicks!

LiveUpload to Facebook is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their photos to Facebook. The plug-in takes advantage of the new people tagging in Photo Gallery, too! This means that when you tag your friends in Photo Gallery, if you’re also Facebook friends with those people, those tags will automatically appear on the published photos on Facebook. Pretty cool, huh?

Some of the LiveUpload to Facebook plug-in features:

Add multiple Facebook accounts.
Quickly and easily upload your photos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
Upload your pictures to an existing album or create a new one.

LiveUpload to YouTube is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Movie Maker Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their videos straight to YouTube. For example, once you’ve quickly created that exciting new video using Movie Maker, simply click the Publish button and choose LiveUpload to YouTube to share it!

(Note for developers out there… The people tags, along with other metadata, are exposed as part of the new Publish API. Please see the SDK for more information. Plus, Will was also super kind enough to share his approach with the community by posting the source to both of these plug-ins on CodePlex.)

Finally, don’t forget to let us know if you’ve built your own Photo Gallery or Movie Maker plug-in that you want to share. We’re keeping a list of plug-ins that we know about on our plug-ins download page.

Michael Palermiti, Program Manager

Give your photos the Black and White treatment!

pixblog — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:37:31 GMT

One of the top feature requests after last year’s release of Windows Live Photo Gallery was for the ability to convert photographs to black and white. We listened, and are happy to introduce this feature to you!

We realize there are some photos that just deserve the extra attention. Those photos, such as those captured on your graduation or wedding day, have their own special content, mood, and colors. We wanted to cater to these differences, and thus built six black and white effects from which to choose from.

Black & white filters use the colors in your original photograph to determine shades (from black through gray to white) in your black & white photograph. By adding a colored filter to your photograph when converting it to black and white, you can create some dramatic and stunning black and white images.

Try out the yellow and orange filters for your portrait and landscape images. The yellow filter, which darkens blues and greens slightly, works well on landscapes by adding subtle contrast between the sky and the white clouds and between the green tones in foliage. The orange filter, which creates stronger effects than the yellow filter, darkens blues and greens while lightening the yellow, orange and red in an image. This filter provides greater definition to fine details. For example, it differentiates flowers from surrounding foliage and also creates a more striking sky by making the blue sky darker and enhancing the white clouds. To add a dramatic touch to your outdoor images and create strong contrast effects, give the red filter a go. This filter, which significantly darkens blues and greens, causes blue skies to be shown as almost black while making the white clouds pop. This filter is also a good choice to capture fine details in still-life photography.

Additionally, various effects can be achieved by coloring your B&W image with certain tints. Give your images an antique or aged look with the Sepia tone, or an artistic touch with the Cyan tone.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=9d9e4e8a-8352-4b6f-85fd-6d16b934cd11" target="_new" title="Black and White Effects">Video: Black and White Effects</a>

[Direct link]

First select an image and click on the Fix button in the command bar at the top. This will bring up the image to edit with the Fix pane to its side. To access this feature, click on the Black and white effects button. Converting your image to black and white is simple – just select any of the six effects that are available. Experiment and play around with the different settings provided to find the one that you like best!

Enjoy!

Arwa Tyebkhan, Program Manager

Authoring a Publish Plug-in for SmugMug

pixblog — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:32:09 GMT

This is a guest post from Omar Shahine. When we announced an internal beta of our new Publish API a few months ago he jumped right on it and within a few days built his Smugmug plug-in. If you’re a Photo Gallery user that also happens to use Smugmug to share photos AND videos, then this plug-in is for you! Check out the plug-ins download page (more plug-ins are coming soon). Anyway, enjoy Omar’s perspective. –Michael Palermiti

~~~~~

Hi There! My name is Omar Shahine and I’m a Program Manager on the Hotmail team. I also happen to be a photography enthusiast and long time reader of this blog. The Photo Gallery team asked if I’d blog about my experience building a Publish Plug-in for SmugMug, my photo sharing service of choice. [download Publish on SmugMug]

Let me start out by saying that I’ve already authored an uploader for SmugMug called Send to SmugMug. This is a .NET program that I wrote many years back to simplify and streamline uploading pictures from the Windows Shell to SmugMug. It’s gotten popular over the years and I’ve added lots of features. Send to SmugMug was originally written for Windows XP, which seems like a long time ago for me.

Why author a Plug-in?

When Windows Live Photo Gallery was released last year I started to use it for all my photo management. Both my wife and I feel it’s the easiest product to tag, rate, and organize our photos. We have over 30,000 pictures right now and since having our first child almost 2 years ago we take a LOT of pictures and upload to them to SmugMug to share with our friends and family. In fact, we’ve developed an interesting workflow. My wife and I rate all our photos and anything with a 3 star or higher rating gets uploaded. Things with 2 star ratings we keep, but don’t share or play through our slideshow screensaver on our TV powered by Windows Media Center.

Our basic philosophy on ratings is to use the pyramid system (where there are very few 5 star, and very many 3 and 2 star):

1 star: throw away
2 star: keep, but don’t share
3 star: good picture, this is the majority of our ratings
4 star: analog photo album quality
5 star: good enough to put in a picture frame in the house or office. we have very few of these

Why am I telling you this? Well Photo Gallery lets you easily view and filter by rating so uploading pictures with 3 stars or higher is as simple as clicking a button to filter and then publishing, something not possible in the Windows Shell.

Since we use Photo Gallery a lot, it got to be inconvenient for us to keep having to use the Windows Shell and Send to SmugMug to upload our photos. So when the Publish Plug-in SDK was sent my way a few months ago, you can imagine how excited I was to start writing some code :-).

Authoring a Plug-in

You might wonder how long it took me to write the Publish on SmugMug Plug-in. Not long. All in all I would say I spent 3 days working on the plug-in. The first day was mainly downloading and examining the Sample Flickr Plug-in and setting up my project in Visual Studio 2008. I spent the next day writing code and creating the installer. On the third day I created an auto-update feature and created the web pages and such to host my Plug-in.

Of course one thing that helped me tremendously was that I already had a bunch of code that talked to SmugMug using their API. If you are starting from scratch and have no code at all to talk to a publishing service it could take longer.

What Publish on SmugMug does

It’s pretty simple really. Much simpler than the Flickr Plug-in (due to the differences between Flickr an SmugMug).

1. You select a photo, or video, or combination of any number of them.

2. You then select Publish on SmugMug… from the Publish Menu

3. You are asked for your username and password for SmugMug

4. You then select a Gallery to upload to, or create a new one:

5. You then click Publish

You can then click View to be taken to the uploaded Photo or Gallery.

How I wrote Publish on SmugMug

If you are like me, then there is only one thing you need to figure this out. Just download the Sample Flickr Plug-in and start messing around! I didn’t read any of the SDK docs, although they are there if you need them. The overview doc is a good place to get an understanding of what you need to know if you have to see flow diagrams before looking at sample code.

The basic idea for any Publish plug-in is going to be:

Collect the user credentials and log into the service
Create a “container” for the uploaded items or allow selection of an existing “container”. In this case a container can be an Album, Gallery, Folder etc
Upload the selected items in Photo Gallery supplying any necessary meta data to the service (I provide Caption, Keywords, and People Tags).
Handle progress and errors
Supply a URL the user can use to visit the site when the upload is complete

What I did was:

Create my own registry entries for my Plug-in
Reviewed the Flickr Plug-in to get an idea of how the call flow worked
Figured out what parts of the Plug-in I needed to rip out and replace with my own code
1. Replace the UX in the Sample with my own dialogs and screens using the default ones as a starting point.
2. Stubbed out the functions that I would need to talk to SmugMug
3. Replaced that code with code from my SmugMug API (which I mentioned I already wrote previously). If you are talking to a new Publish service I would recommend writing a class library to handle all the API logic
Create a new installer using the built in Visual Studio Setup project and add the necessary registry entries to register the Publish Plug-in.

The only interesting issues I ran into writing my plug-in were:

The API expects that you will be dealing with file streams. I had to modify my API to support passing a file stream rather than just a path to the photo.
The SessionXml is where state is stored, and you cannot assume that any state in your code will be persisted as Photo Gallery will invoke your code with each photo. So don’t store things in static variables expecting them to be there on each call. You can persist whatever you want in the SessionXml object.
If you need to store things across sessions like username and other information you can use PersistXml. I already store my stuff in the Registry so I had no use for this.
If you want to include People Tags with the tags in the photo on upload you must explicitly get them from SessionXml

That’s it! I hope you enjoy Publish on SmugMug or creating your own Publish Plug-in.

Omar Shahine, Lead Program Manager on Hotmail

You’ve tagged them, now here’s how to find them fast

pixblog — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:08:14 GMT

If you read John’s recent post, an introduction to “people tags”, you now know that you can quickly tag the faces in your photos-- using either the contacts in your contacts list, or any name you want. So hopefully by now you’ve played around with people tags in our beta, adding them to photos of your friends, family, and that “celebrity” you’re stalking.

One reason you tagged all those photos is that at some point you’ll want to find some of them quickly. So, now the fun part: here’s how to do it.

Turns out you can find photos that have a people tag pretty much the same way you find a photo with a descriptive tag. You can use the navigation pane on the left, use the info pane on the right, or search and arrange by people tags.

In the navigation pane (hint: left side of the window), when you select a contact or other person, you’ll see all of the photos they’re tagged in. It’s that simple.

Maybe you’re more likely to browse your photos a different way. If you’re browsing by date, for example, and you find a photo with some friends in it. If you want to find all the pictures you have that contain one of the people from that picture, select the name of that person from the pane on the right, like this:

The gallery will switch to the first view, with the person selected in the navigation pane and all of the pictures of them ready for your perusal.
The third way to find people is with search. Let me walk you through it.

Search looks at all of the properties (or tags) of your photos, including your descriptive tags, the camera model, the author, etc. Here I’ve selected the folder “All Photos and Videos” and then searched for “john.” So in addition to the pictures tagged with “John,” there are a few photos with the caption “John and Fairview,”, which is the street address of the Seattle Times and the clock featured in this blog post. And there are also some photos from a team evet that I got from John, where he’s tagged as the author.

After that, I would have to sort through all of these search results to figure out which ones are tagged “John.” Kind of a pain. So, this is a great time for me to use the “arrange by” view. Over to the left of the search box, I can arrange by several properties. If I select Person, the people-tagged photo floats to the top.

Voila! Now I can publish them, print them, fix them up, or do something creative. My teammates will be blogging about new and old ways of doing these things over the coming weeks.

Robert Ketcherside, Program Manager

Why “people tags”?

pixblog — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:28:07 GMT

We've always had keyword (descriptive) tagging in Photo Gallery. Heck, we've had it in Microsoft photo products since Windows XP. So why add a whole new type of tag to Windows Live Photo Gallery? Because people take lots of pictures of people. Think about the photos that are most special to you. Let me guess— they have people in them, right? So it makes sense for the software you use to organize your photos to help you focus on the people in them. That's what people tags are all about.

In the beta version, you can see that once you sign in to Windows Live, we add your contacts to the navigation tree. When you click a contact, you see all the photos you've tagged of that person, as well as links to photos they're sharing with you.

But your contact list is just a start. Someone doesn't have to be a Messenger or Hotmail contact for you to tag them. You can tag anyone. Just click the Add a new person link, or type in a new name when you're tagging.

If there's a face in your photo, Photo Gallery automatically finds it, which makes tagging people faster and easier. From the gallery view, you can see how many untagged people are in your photos, and follow the link to tag them. Photo Gallery can't find every face, so you can always click Add people tag to add tags yourself.

There are a few ways to add people tags to photos. In gallery mode, you can bulk add by selecting several photos and dragging them to the person you want to tag in the navigation tree. When viewing a single photo, you can apply an individual tag to each found person by clicking the identify link in the info pane. You can also click the face of the person you want to tag.

What's unique thing about the Photo Gallery tagging system is that, like keywords, people tags are written to the file. So if you copy the photo to another computer or back up all your photos, your tags stay with the file. Because the people tags are attached to your photos, the people you share them with will be able to see your people tags. Of course, we also want to make sure you stay in control of your data, so we've added some new settings to let you manage the metadata you publish on photo-sharing sites.

For the developers out there, the people tags are written out as XMP and, yes, you can read them. I expect folks writing publish plug-ins to take advantage of this.

— John Thornton, Program Manager

Photo Gallery beta cheat sheet

pixblog — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:22:58 GMT

We’ve packed a lot into the new beta version of Windows Live Photo Gallery. At the same time we’ve heard users ask, “What’s new in Photo Gallery?”. Here’s a quick clip-and-save list of the top features to check out. In the coming weeks we’ll be going into more detail about everything on this list. Stay tuned.

An updated look. Photo Gallery has a new user interface design that puts the emphasis on you and your content. We’ve minimized the amount of space that controls take up in order to give more space and focus to your photos and videos. Want even more room? Collapse the navigation tree (hint: pane on the left) and close the info pane (hint: pane on the right) for a wall-to-wall view of your collection:

Just the right amount of Info. Try out the new Info pane (hint: click the Info button to turn on or off) for a quick look at the people and descriptive tags you’ve assigned to your photos. Based on popular requests, we’ve also bubbled up more metadata about your photos and videos. Plus, you can dial in how much metadata you want to see by dragging the divider up and down. You control what you want to see.

People tags! Photo Gallery automatically detects faces in your photos to make it easy to tag. And with our people tagging user interface you can quickly choose folks from your Messenger and Mail contact lists. Open up a photo and click “Add people tags” to get started. And to appeal to the narcissist is all of us, there’s a single click “That’s Me” link to identify yourself in photos.

Keep in touch. Browse your photos by person using the People navigation area. When you’re browsing by person, click on someone’s name and look at the new people banner (hint: along the top) to see the latest photos they have shared online at Windows Live, and download the ones you like – right from within Photo Gallery.

Make your photos look great. Photo Gallery provides the tools you need to get it right and add a personal touch, with little effort. For example, if you’re like me, all your photos come out a little crooked. Just click on Straighten photo, and Photo Gallery will automatically straighten it, or use the slider to tweak it yourself to add a neat effect. While we all love color, the new Black and White effects will give an artistic touch to your photos.

Publish wherever you want. We think that Photo Gallery is so good that users will want you to use it every time to share your photos, no matter what online service you use. Our new SDK will let developers create plug-ins for users that, when installed, will appear right on the Publish menu. Check out the current list of available plug-ins.

From photos to movies. Now going from your pictures to a published video on the web is just a couple of clicks away. Choose photos and video clips from your collection, and click Make a Movie to put together a great looking movie.

Limit the information about each file when you share. The new Publish options let you control what file metadata is included when you share your photos online.

Support for Photosynth, Image Composite Editor, and other Extras. There’s always room for more! The new Extras menu is the place to look for apps and services that extend the Photo Gallery experience. Photosynth is the first experience that’s integrated – just install it to start making your own synths from Photo Gallery. Want creative control over the image stitching process? Try out the brand new Image Composite Editor. Both of these new programs are just a click away on the Photo Gallery’s Extras menu when installed.

And there are a few more gems hidden in there as well. I hope you’ll give us a spin – and tell us what you think!

-- Rodger Benson (Lead Program Manager)

Next version of Windows Live

pixblog — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:02:51 GMT

In just a short while brand new beta versions of Windows Live Photo Gallery and the completely brand new Windows Live Movie Maker will be available for free at http://download.live.com! In addition to Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, this beta release includes significant updates to all of the Windows Live software applications for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Writer, Toolbar and Family Safety. You’ll find sweet new features across the products. If you want to hear more about what we’re delivering across Windows Live, check out this blog post from Chris Jones.

Here are some of cool things you can do with the new beta version of Photo Gallery:

People tagging: Photo Gallery automatically finds the people in your photos so you can add a name to the face. Then later, all you need to do is type in someone’s name to see all the photos of that person.
Photos from friends: See new photos from the people you know as soon as they post them online. Their new shots come to you automatically in Photo Gallery.
Photo editing: Adjust exposure, color, or detail by hand, or use auto adjust—either way, your photos look great. You can even create amazing panoramas—Photo Gallery automatically stitches them together for you.
More support for 3^rd parties! We’ve heard tons of requests for more publishing options, so this release includes a new Publishing API that enables the community to build plug-ins for virtually any sharing service. A new resource for developers will be at http://dev.live.com/photogallery.

And here’s what you’ll find in the Movie Maker beta:

Seamless movie creation: Import and edit your movies so they look great, and then publish to the web—all in just a few clicks.
All new user interface: Movie Maker has been redesigned to help you combine photos, video clips, and music into movies you’ll be proud of.
Posting your movie to the web: It's easy to publish your finished masterpieces to most major video-sharing sites. So there’s no excuse to keep your work to yourself.

This list really only scratches the surface. We’ll definitely be blogging a lot more in the coming days and weeks about Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. Stay tuned!

--Digital Memories team

You can get translations of this blog in several languages by copying this web address into the Windows Live Translator service.

ShutterSpeed – Episode 2 is posted!

pixblog — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:13:35 GMT

We're back again with a new episode of ShutterSpeed, a relatively new online photography show for photo enthusiasts. In episode 2 Nic Fillingham (host) is joined by Bill Crow, Jeff Greene, and myself.

We talk about a handful of topics including Photosynth on CSI, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools with geo-tagging, and I give a hands-on demo of Windows Live Photo Gallery from importing your photos to doing some quick tagging and editing.

ShutterSpeed Episode 02

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

Feedback? Comments? Suggestions? Please let us know via the comments section below or email shutterspeed@on10.net. Thanks!

- Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)

Geotagging Photos with Windows Live (without using a GPS device)

pixblog — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:01:00 GMT

I love travel – seeing new landscapes, new cities, and expanding the list of places I’ve been. Of course,I don’t have the opportunity to go everywhere all the time, but I still want to see what different places around the world are like. I also want to send pictures to family and friends after a trip to show them where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. As a result, I’m a bit of a geotagging junky. I love recording and organizing where I’ve taken my photos, as well as knowing where – exactly where – others have taken their photos.

Geotagging, for many people, implies going on trips with a camera and a GPS receiver, and then using some custom software to tag all the photos with the GPS data after the trip. Being one who loves geotagging, I have a confession, though: I have never owned a GPS device.

So, how can I geotag photos and share them with family and friends? I can explore the world virtually through many different mapping applications that combine both maps and photos. Some of these allow geotagging (a la Flickr, et al), but that records only individual photo’s locations, not a full tour. What I’ve found out is a way to play around with the Live Maps Collections feature to create a photo tour. So, for those who want to create simple photo tours to share with friends and the world (and don’t want to deal with GPS), here’s how.

This week I’ll show a straightforward, 2D method of creating geotagged collections of photos. This article is only the first of two parts. The second part will show how to take advantage of the 3D features of Virtual Earth to make a fuller video-like geotagged photo tour so you'll want to look out for that post!

Building a Geotagged Set of Photos

There are three parts to building a geotagged set of photos. The first is to upload the photos that I want to tag. The second is creating the geotags, which is done using the Virtual Earth collections. The last is to attach the photos to items in the collection. As a note, you will need a Windows LiveID to be able to create and save collections as well as upload photos.

Step 1

We do this step for you. Simply upload the pictures you want to tag to Windows Live Spaces using the Windows Live Photo Gallery. The first step is covered in a previous article so I won’t repeat it here. Once you’ve uploaded the album you want to tag, view the album.

Step 2

Creating a Collection

Now open another browser window and go to http://maps.live.com. Once you arrive there, sign in (in the upper right-hand corner). You can now create a new collection and save it with your Live ID. Click the “Collections” link in the upper right-hand area of the page and click “Open your collections”. It’s OK that if you don’t have any yet. You can make them after you follow the link.

When you’ve clicked the link, you should get something like this where you can add your new collection:

I’ve already got my collection sitting here (“Moving to Washington”) so I’ll show you how to create an additional collection. Simply click “New Collection” and fill in the blanks. It should look as follows:

Make sure to turn on sharing if you want your friends to be able to see it. And if you don’t mind the general public seeing it, let the “Make this collection searchable” box stay selected.

Adding Geotags/Pushpins

Arriving at this stage, you can now add items by clicking the pushpin button at the bottom. Don’t be confused by the text in the box talking about “Add to collection” like I was – that’s just for adding items found using searches. We’re not doing that here.

So next, I’ll show how to add geotags. Live Maps uses pushpins to mark places on a map – just like how people put pins in wall maps to show where they’ve been. We add pins to a collection and then add photos to those pins.

Adding pins is simple, just open you’re collection and click the “Add a pushpin” button at the bottom of the “Collections editor” window. In 2D with the “Hybrid” map view, it looks like this:

After clicking to add a pushpin, click on the map to place the pin. Here’s what shows up:

This is the same location as the 2D, but I’ve rotated the view (I’ll show why next week). Now we can add a couple of details about the point, which is our geotag for a photo. Next, we tie a photo to the pushpin, which we have two ways of doing. The first is using the album that I created by uploading from the Live Photo Gallery. The second is to use Live Maps’ upload tool, which I won’t show here since it’s pretty easy.

Tagging Photos

To add a photo to the pushpin I created, I go to the window I left open from Step 1 that’s viewing the album I just uploaded to Live Spaces. I select the photo from the album I want and view it.

On the right, there are a bunch of options to play around with. Here, we’ll hack the “Embed” feature to get what we want. Click the “Embed” link (underlined in the picture below). When you do, some options will show up down below the album area. Here we’ll use the “Copy” feature of the “Emed this photo” box.

When you do, some options will show up down below the album area. Here we’ll use the “Copy” feature of the “Embed this photo” box. (Make sure to click allow on the dialog that comes up if you’re using Vista).

Now, we paste this link into the geotag pin we created in the collection and clean it up by removing the HTML. The pasting and cleanup looks like this:

Delete the highlighted text shown in the images above. Now just click “Save”, and you’ve geotagged your photo! If you notice, there’s a 3D tour option when you’re using the 3D mode. I’ll show how to use that next week.

Do these steps for as many photos as you want. When you’re done, simply click the “Actions” link next to the “My Collections ” link and choose “Send in e-mail” to send a link for your friends and family to view your tour.

Of course, one of the cool things about collections is that the more people use it, the more photos that can be explored. Speaking of exploring, here’s the link (http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=AF105ADE514CC699!103&encType=1) to the collection I created that’s a tour of the places I went through when moving from New Jersey out to Redmond to work for Microsoft.

Let us know what you think! What works and what doesn’t with geotagging? What do you like about geotagging and what are cool ways you think to geotag photos? What are cool ways to explore other’s geotagged photos?

- Tim O'Connor (Software Development Engineer)