Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Spaces

Our new Photos web service is LIVE!

pixblog — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:21:30 GMT

We're excited to report that the completely redesigned photos.live.com is up and running!

Here are just a few reasons why you should go check it out:

Beautiful new views of your photos, including an amazing Slide show view.
25 GB of FREE storage! That's a ton of pictures of any resolution plus there's no more 500-per-month limit on photos.
The photo-centric What's New feed on photos.live.com shows you the photos your friends are sharing.
Spaces and SkyDrive photos are now combined, so all of your photos are in one place.
Better permissions give you greater control over who can see your photos online.

And that only scratches the surface of the new Windows Live Photos service. In future posts, we'll take a look at more of the amazing features Photos has to offer. For even more information, read the SkyDrive team's blog post.

— The web Photos team

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)

Share some photo love, send a photo email!

pixblog — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:51:07 GMT

Windows Live Photo Gallery helps you easily send your favorite photos via email. To do this simply select the photos you want to send to your family or friends and click the E-mail button on the Photo Gallery command bar. When you do this Photo Gallery will use the default email program to create an email message with your photos attached. This is important to know if you, like many people, have more than one program that they use to send email (these programs are referred to as e-mail clients). Some common clients are Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Outlook Express. In order to ensure that your photos are sent with the e-mail client you want you will have to make sure that e-mail client is the default program.

Want better looking photo emails than just plain attachments? Use Windows Live Mail!

When you use Windows Live Mail you can add nice effects to your mail and your photos. You get layout and picture frame options and the photos are sent in the message and not as an attachment. So if Windows Live Mail isn't already your default mail client, you can set it up to be:

1. In Windows Live Mail, open the options dialog. To do this click on the Show Menu button and choose “Show all menus.” Once you can see all menus you can select the “Tools” menu and choose “Options.”

2. In the Options dialog click the “General” tab and click the “Make Default” button and click “OK.”

That’s it! You are ready for a great photo mail experience.

What if you want to use Outlook?

You can use Outlook if you would prefer. To make Outlook your default email client you need to open the “Options” dialog from the “Tools” menu. In the “Other” tab you can check the box that says “Make Outlook the default program for E-mail, Contacts and Calendar.” Please note, sending photos via Outlook will cause the photos to be sent as an attachment.

What if you don’t have an e-mail client and check your mail using Internet Explorer or another web browser?

Currently, the e-mail button will not work for you. However, if you publish your photos to a Windows Live Space you can use “Send a link” to send a photo mail via your Windows Live account.

We hope you have a great photo sharing experience. Please let us know if you have questions or other feedback.

- Troy Barnes (SDET)

Spaces Photo API (Alpha) available!

pixblog — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:26:22 GMT

Angus Logan, Technical Product Manager on the Windows Live Platform team, announced the immediate availability of the Windows Live Spaces Photo API (alpha) yesterday. As he puts it in his one liner: The Windows Live Spaces Photo API allows a user to delegate permissions for a third party web site to read or read/write on albums and photos stored within Windows Live Spaces via a server to server API.

The alpha API comes complete with documentation and a brand new interactive SDK:

Angus was nice enough to share out a Powerpoint presentation that covers the overview of the API and some code samples, too:

What kind of coolness will you create with it?

- pixblog

The next generation of Windows Live

pixblog — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:32:17 GMT

As you've probably heard, the next generation of Windows Live has arrived and its fresh out of the oven without a beta tag! If you're the long reading type then take a look at the presspass Q&A available here which provides some great insight. There is also a Windows Live fact sheet available here which provides lots of details about this week's release. This afternoon our team along with the other Windows Live teams celebrated the release at our "ship party" (photo to the right).

You can now get the new Windows Live at windowslive.com -- free!

Overall it's been an amazing year for our team and we're proud of the work we've accomplished. First and foremost, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank the private beta testers. Your help very early on proved to be invaluable to the quality of this release. We'd also like to thank all of the early adopters of the public beta, readers of this blog that sent us emails and comments, and all of the other customers we heard from (Microsoft employees, too!) that helped us tremendously. Everyone: THANK YOU!

Here are only a few of the many great customer quotes we've seen recently that make all the sweat worth it:

“It is both functional and beautiful to work with.
Needless to say, Live Photo Gallery is icing on the cake - moist, delicious cake. And the cake is not a lie."
- Long Zheng (www.startedsomething.com)

“This is really a wonderful thing. I am so glad that you guys finally filled this huge feature gap and enabled easy publishing.”
- triplegreen (comment on our blog)

“Great update, been using spaces for quite some time now and appreciate the work you all do on it, thanks.”
- Mark (comment on Spaces Team blog)
“Thank you for redesigning the photo module!”
- Ivan Sammy (comment on Spaces Team blog)
"Honestly, I have to admit that Microsoft really stepped up their game with the new Windows Live Photo Gallery by adding support for Flickr."
- Ryan (www.cybernetnews.com)

“Thank you for listening to users.”
- someone (comment on our blog)

"This (panorama feature) is the kind of technology you'd normally see reserved for higher end, paid for, photo editing programs but now it's available to everyone."
- Steve Clayton (http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01)

“Please keep up the great work - I'd love to be working on a product that's this good ;-)”
- cjm55 (comment on our blog)

"Thank you! You just got yourself a Picasa convert."
- kkuphal (comment on our blog)

We'd like to leave you with a few new videos available online...

First, check out the really great "Share life as it happens" video on the brand new windowslive.com. This video is a quick but well done overview of how simple Windows Live Photo Gallery + Windows Live Spaces makes it to share your memories with those you care about.
Second, the crew at Channel 10 recently came over to our building and interviewed a couple of our team members. Watch the interview on Channel 10.

Now, go download Windows Live and Share a smile and help us give to Operation Smile!

- pixblog

Windows Live Spaces updates

pixblog — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:26:00 GMT

Today, Windows Live Spaces launced a bunch of new features, including Windows Live Events. You can read all about what's new on the Spaces team blog.

Below is a re-print of the photo-specific features that were launched today:

Do more with your photos

With this release, we’ve made it easier to share photos using Spaces.

Here’s how:

Let your friends know about new photos you’ve added to your space. Click Send a link and you’ll get a formatted e-mail with links to your album – just add your friends and family to the “To:” line and click Send.

Put your photos and albums on other websites. Click Embed and then copy the web address or embed code and paste it into the appropriate location on the other site.
Blog about your own or other people’s photos. Click Blog it and a new blog entry is created automatically with the photo already in the entry. Just add your thoughts and click Publish entry.
No more downloading an entire album of photos one by one. Download all the photos in an album by clicking Download and then selecting Download album.
Share photos from your space on Facebook (only in some markets where Facebook is available)
For those wall-worthy shots, you can order prints online from HP Snapfish in 9 new markets including Australia, Belgium, France, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

Control who can see your albums

Want Mom to see the pictures from your hiking trip, but not the shots from your friend's birthday? No problem! Now you can choose who can see which albums on your space.

Just go to an album and click Edit album. You’ll see what the current permissions are for that album. To change them, click Change permissions. (By default, all albums are set to use the same permissions as your space.)

Add photos to your blog entries

You can now add and resize photos directly in your blog entries to make a richer experience for readers.

Note: If you want more options for editing your Spaces blog entries, download Windows Live Writer. It’s free, and it makes it easy to compose, edit, preview, and post entries to Windows Live Spaces.

- pixblog

Not only is uploading easy, but so is downloading

pixblog — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:20:00 GMT

In previous posts we’ve talked about the new publish options available from the Live Photo Gallery. In addition to being able to publish, there are many cases where it’s nice to be able to get images out of album and into your local gallery. Live Spaces offers two ways to download photos from an album. The first way is to download a single photo at a time. This is useful if you just want one photo from an album. In addition to the ability to download a single photo, we’ve also added a new feature which enables you to download an entire album from any space at once. This feature makes it easy to grab the high-res images you want from any album you have permissions too.

At the top of each Live Spaces album you will see a button for “Download photo” and “Download album”. Clicking “Download photo” will save the current photo. Clicking “Download album” will bring up a view which you can use to select what photos you want to download.

From here you can decide what photos from this album you want to download to your local machine. By default, the images are stored under your “My pictures” folder, in a folder named “Downloaded Albums” with subfolders for the space and album name. But you can configure where and how you want the images saved under the “More options” link. Clicking download starts copying each file from the space to your local machine.

When the download is completed, the Live Photo Gallery is launched so you can enjoy the photos.

Couple of things you’ll want to be aware of when playing with this feature:

Spaces downsamples images that are larger than 1600x1600, so their longest dimension is 1600. We will always download the largest image stored on spaces, but the max size will be 1600x1600.
Spaces hasn’t always stored highres images – The highres support is new, so if you are downloading an old album spaces won’t have a highres image available. You’ll still get the biggest one we have stored.
It’s a beta and we have a bug to fix… In order to play with this feature in the beta you’ll want to publish from the Live Photo Gallery client. If you use the Live Spaces album upload web page, the “Download album” link will only get the 400x400 version. But we’ll have this fixed before we ship.

Enjoy! As always, we sincerely appreciate your feedback. Let us know how we are doing.

-John Thornton (Program Manager)

We make it easy to share on your Soapbox

pixblog — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:38:00 GMT

As I blogged about yesterday, we’ve built some pretty quick & simple sharing features into Windows Live Photo Gallery. In this post I’d like to go through the steps to publish your video memories online at the recently updated MSN Soapbox service:

Step 1: Select a video from your library inside Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Step 2: Click on the Publish button and then select Publish on MSN Soapbox…

In order to enable users to publish on Soapbox, we needed a way to allow users to sign in with their Windows Live ID (a.k.a. Passport). So, if you’re not already signed in with your Live ID in the Photo Gallery you’ll be asked to sign in when you try to publish. Since Photo Gallery is integrated with Live ID, as soon as you sign in with your Live ID we’ll automatically know your Soapbox information so you won’t be asked to provide any information or configure anything. If you’ve never used Soapbox before, the first time you publish a video we’ll take care of setting up your Soapbox account.

Step 3: Fill in all of the fields on the Publish dialog:

We’ll automatically fill in the Title using the video file name (minus the file extension, of course) and the Description using the caption (if you’ve previously set one). Of course, you can edit these if you want to. In addition to those fields, just like the Soapbox web upload tool, we allow you to add up to five Tags and set the Category from a list. Finally, you can choose to make your video public or keep it private for just you and whomever you send a link to by setting it to private. After you click the Publish button, we’ll take care of the rest…

Since Soapbox currently has a 100MB file size upload limit, if you video is over 100MB we’ll re-encode it to the bit rate that Soapbox supports, compressing the overall file size. Technically, there is a limit to the amount of compression we can do in order to make sure the end result is still under 100MB in file size. To make it easy just remember as long as your video is 20 minutes or less, we’ll be able to upload it on Soapbox. It’s that simple! Note: There are some video formats that we are unable to re-encode and if that’s the case we’ll tell you when you try to publish them.

Again, just like the Publish on Windows Live Spaces feature, we also provide a summary dialog with a View video button here too.

There will be a brief period (time varies depending on length of video) when your video is being processed by Soapbox. During this time you’ll see your video placeholder on your Soapbox account, but you won’t be able to play it back until the processing is complete.

Do you dig it? What do you like/dislike about this? What can we do to make your video sharing experience better?

- Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)

Seamlessly publish your precious photos on Spaces

pixblog — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:58:00 GMT

As you (hopefully) know by now, we released our first public beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery a few days ago. Even though we’re not quite done tinkering with it I’d like to tell you about one of the best new features we’ve worked hard on these last few months.

First, a question: Why do most people take photos? OK, I admit, there isn’t a 100% correct answer to that question but I’d be willing to bet something along the lines of “to share with my friends and family” would be darn near the top. In fact, when I was at CES earlier this year and I was working at the Microsoft Digital Memories booth, hands down the most frequently asked question I got was “Can I publish my photos to the web from the Photo Gallery?”. Sadly, at the time, we didn’t have any features that enabled this but we heard you loud and clear!

The brand new Publish on Windows Live Spaces feature provides a seamless and streamlined way to share your digital photos on your space directly from the same application you use to import, organize and edit them. Allow me to walk through the play by play:

After you’ve selected one or more photos you’d like to publish on your space, click on the Publish button and then select Publish on Windows Live Spaces…

In order to enable users to publish on Windows Live Spaces, we needed a way to allow users to sign in with their Windows Live ID (a.k.a. Passport). So, if you’re not already signed in with your Live ID in the Photo Gallery you’ll be asked to sign in when you try to publish. Since Photo Gallery is integrated with Live ID, as soon as you sign in with your Live ID we’ll automatically know your space information so you won’t be asked to provide any information or configure anything. If you’ve never even used Spaces before, no worries… the first time you publish photos we’ll take care of setting up your new space and we’ll even configure it to use one of the photo themes available on Spaces. Nice, eh? ;)

OK, so after you’ve signed in the Publish on Windows Live Spaces dialog will appear (below). You have two main choices when it comes to publishing: you can either publish your photos in a new album or to an existing one already on your space. The default option is a new album. The thumbnail displayed as the new album cover will be automatically chosen based on the data taken metadata. The album title will be pre-populated with the folder name where that first image is located on your hard drive. The idea is when you import your photos many users give the folder containing the set of photos a useful name, so we’ll assume that might be a good starting point, but you can change it. If you're looking to allow people to enjoy great prints and full screen slides shows of your shared photos, select the Optimize photos for printing check box (checked by default in a few markets).

If you don’t want to create a new photo album and just want to keep adding photos to an existing album on your space, click the Add to an existing album link (on the main Publish dialog, above) and we’ll show you the list of albums on your space. We provide a rich look by showing you the album cover, album title, the last modified date, # of photos and eventually the permission (note: during the Beta the permission displayed will always be “Public” because we haven’t quite finished this dialog yet).

Regardless if you choose to publish to a new album or an existing one, once you click on the Publish button on the dialogs above, the upload progress will appear. *Power user tip* If you want to upload more than one group of photos at a time, you can! As one group is being uploaded, you can select some more photos and repeat the publish steps. As photos are being uploaded, the follow-up publishes will be queued up behind each other and will start automatically as the previous one completes. Try it out!

As each upload completes a summary dialog will appear (below). We’re guessing most users will always want to check out the album online, maybe customize it, and then send a link to it to their friends. The View album button gets you to the album directly.

That’s the Publish on Windows Live Spaces feature in a nutshell. Since we’re in Beta we’d love to get your feedback. What do you like? What do you hate? What can we do to make your photo sharing experience better?

- Michael Palermiti (Program Manager)

Full Screen Slideshow on Spaces

pixblog — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:01:00 GMT

So, you shelled out good money for a 21” LCD monitor with 1600 x 1200 resolution, and now you’re wondering “why do all these web sites just show me photos in a little 600 pixel wide area?” All those bright pixels, eager to light up and show off your memories, languishing unused. It’s a crying shame.

Fret no more. With the latest release of Windows Live Spaces, we’ve added a “View full screen” button that will unleash the full potential of your monitor and display slideshows as big as your display will allow.

For now, it will scale up the small pictures you’ve been seeing in page, but those of you who have been playing with our Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta 1 can see that bigger things are on the horizon. If you'd like to see it in action, take a look at my photos from a recent backpacking trip to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington's Cascade Mountains (including some panoramics stitched with the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta 1).

Now head on over to the The Space Craft (the official Spaces Team blog) to read about all the other great stuff in this release of Windows Live Spaces.

- Jordan Schwartz, Program Manager