Jamie's space: Live Photo Gallery

A great new feature for Windows Live Photo Gallery

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:28:16 GMT

There's an exciting blog entry on Liveside today which states:

Windows Live Photo Gallery - the main new feature in the current M1 build is facial recognition. Photo Gallery will automatically recognise people's faces in your photos, and users will be able to add tags to each person

That's very interesting because in a blog entry entitled "Auto-tagging in WL Photo Gallery" from November 2007 I asked for that very same feature:

...wouldn't it be better if Windows Live Photo Gallery suggested tags to us and we just pick the ones that we want. For example, I take a lot of photos of my fiance, Helen. It would be useful if, when importing more pictures of Helen, Windows Live Photo Gallery were intelligent enough to realise that one of the faces appearing in my new batch of photos were similar to those I had already taken and thus infer that any tags from those existing photos might be applicable to some of the new ones

I waste a lot of copy on this blog fantasizing about future enhancements to Windows Live products so I'm delighted that something I want is making it into one of the products.

I now wonder whether this feature will make it into a future Flickr compete from Windows Live? It would be great if tagged photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery got automatically synced to an online photo-sharing service.

Oh look, there's that word again. Sync. Can you spell "Mesh"?

-Jamie

Loving photo stitch in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:30:35 GMT

The view from my office window in downtown Houston.

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, photostitch, photo gallery, panoramic

Auto-tagging in WL Photo Gallery

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:18:19 GMT

Like many people in these days of digital photography I take a lot of photos. I use Windows Live Photo Gallery to manage my photos because of its great visualisation features, its ability to upload to Spaces and Flickr, and some of its neat tricks like creating panoramic photos. If you want to learn more about what Windows Live Photo Gallery can do then go and watch this video that features Program Managers Michael Palermito and John Thornton.

I was watching this video yesterday and the subject of the tagging features in Windows Live Photo Gallery arose. I personally don't use tagging because I find it to be a pain in the neck going through and tagging each and every picture. That's when I had a brainwave - wouldn't it be better if Windows Live Photo Gallery suggested tags to us and we just pick the ones that we want. For example, I take a lot of photos of my fiance, Helen. It would be useful if, when importing more pictures of Helen, Windows Live Photo Gallery were intelligent enough to realise that one of the faces appearing in my new batch of photos were similar to those I had already taken and thus infer that any tags from those existing photos might be applicable to some of the new ones.

That would be a cool feature to have. I suspect the software capabilities already exist (the panoramic feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery already matches similar looking photos) but the bottleneck may be hardware. If you're going to be analysing hi-res photos against a library of thousands of existing ones then you're going to have to be able to chuck some serious processing power against it - I just wonder how much. Perhaps it would be better if we were given the ability to pick a subset of our existing tags for Windows Live Photo Gallery to search through.

Anyway, I've submitted this to http://feedback.live.com and entered it onto my Feedback lista. You can do the same if you like.

-Jamie

P.S. Here are some examples of using the panorama feature that I talked about above. They were made all the better by the 'Sharpen' feature in Windows Live Writer (which is free by the way)

Looking westwards from Houston downtown

Houston Galleria area

Westin Diplomat. Hollywood, Florida.

Hollywood, Florida. Looking south from the Westin Diplomat.

Looking north from the Empire State Building, New York City.

Houston downtown from my office window

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, photo gallery, photostitch, writer

Photosynth goodness in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:30:28 GMT

With the recent news of support for uploading to Flickr Windows Live Photo Gallery is just getting better and better and better. Now check out this job posting which states:

We want to give you the ability to effortlessly share your memories, be that a simple slideshow of photos and videos (e.g. evolution of the Vista Slideshow or of Photo Story), a carefully authored experienced (evolution of Movie Maker), or a fully interactive cinematic multimedia experience (a narrated 3D path through a Photosynth that you can control).

Oh my word. Photosynth is coming to WL Photo Gallery. I want it. I want it NOW! Please, Michael, can you make sure I can share my Photosynth collections on Live Spaces? :)

Thanks to Long Zheng for the tip.

-Jamie

Photo Gallery - Publish to Flickr???

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 03:11:59 GMT

A few days ago in this blog entry I suggested that I'd like the ability to publish photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery to Flickr as well as Live Spaces. I also raised a connect submission saying:

I would like the ability to publish to other services as well such as Flickr. You can compare to other tools in the WL family. WL Mail supports many different types of mail account apart from Hotmail and similarly WL Writer allows us to publish blog entries to many more places than just WL Spaces. Even better would a sync in the opposite direction where my existing albums on Flickr are automatically synced with my offline storage in WL Photo Gallery.

I got this reply:

Thanks for the using Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta! We really appreciate you taking the time to send in your feedback and suggestions. We've heard the feedback and we're looking into it. Stay tuned.
Thanks!
Michael

Crucially though the submission has been closed and the status is set to "Resolved (Fixed)". Hopefully this isn't a mistake and we will, in the next release, be able to publish to Flickr. Fingers crossed!

-Jamie

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:19:34 GMT

I've been having a play with Windows Live Photo Gallery and like most people who use it I'm very impressed by the stitching feature.

These:

became this:

in a matter of minutes. Not a very inspiring photo I know but there isn't much to see out of my balcony window thanks to that piggin' tree :)

There does seem to be a few holes in the product at the moment mind you. Syncing is the one playing on my mind currently. The syncing features in Windows Live Mail are incredibly compelling (for me anyway) - knowing that my offline mail client shows the same as my web client without any effort on my part is really important to me. Given the success of syncing in WL Mail I'm surprised that sync features are not available between WL Photo Gallery and WL Spaces. I would be very happy if a new album in WL Photo Gallery automatically appeared on my Live Space.

Speak of publishing to Live Spaces, I would like the ability to publish to other services as well such as Flickr. Again you can compare to other tools in the WL family. WL Mail supports many different types of mail account apart from Hotmail and similarly WL Writer allows us to publish blog entries to many more places than just WL Spaces. Even better would a sync in the opposite direction where my existing albums on Flickr are automatically synced with my offline storage in WL Photo Gallery. As far as I am aware there is no API standard for publishing to online photo services so I would hope the right people are currently talking about producing one.

All in all WL Photo Gallery is pretty good...but I'm never happy!

-Jamie