Rodger Benson has the newest WLPG post up: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Photo Gallery beta cheat sheet where he goes through at a high level most of the new features in the current beta.
Two of the areas mentioned that we've invested heavily in:
- People tagging: rich meta data for the photo indicating who is in the photo and, optionally, where they are in the photo. We have face detection running to help. Also, for those who like to quickly go through their photos noting themselves, we have a "That's Me!" button.
- Publishing plug-ins: did flickr just add some new feature that we don't support? Do you wish we did something a little different publishing to flickr? You don't have to wait on us, you can write your own plug-in to add that feature to flickr, or write a plug-in to publish to a whole new different destination.
For editing, the straighten feature is something I use heavily. For some reason, I take crooked pictures. Too busy enjoying the shot to frame it right, I guess. With straighten, the gallery will first attempt to automatically correct the photo, and usually that's pretty good. But you can go in and fix it up before applying the change.
I also enjoy the new Info Pane with all the extra info about the photo (date taken, size, exposure, aperture, etc). I miss it when I use the previous version.
Going back to people tagging: note that on sign-in we download your contacts and show them in People tags. For your contacts that have Live IDs and that have set a public profile picture for themselves, we download that picture as you start tagging them in various photos. Then, as you tag them, you'll see their public profile picture in the tagging UI. And in the header if you click on them in your People tags tree.
Ready for the latest Windows Live Beta?
- Downloads - Windows Live - official download link.
And, the Windows Live Photo Gallery download page:
...has a high-level overview of some of the new features.
Today is the day. Windows Live Beta is released later today. Everyone (well, every brave soul willing to install Beta software) can have a chance to try out what we’ve been working on for the past year.
Chris Jones: Windows Live Wire : Building Windows Live.
The Official Photo Gallery blog: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog Next version of Windows Live. That’s also a good place to leave your constructive feedback for the whole team to consider.
Be sure to subscribe to the Photo Gallery (aka, Digital Memories Experience) team blog for frequent updates about the new features. I’ll post some high-level run-throughs, too, of what’s new in the Gallery and do my best to track interesting feedback that shows up in my blog searches.
More later.
Oh, wait, more now: LiveSide has their initial take here: Wave 3 Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features – LiveSide (and shows the end-to-end frustration we all share when way-off-the-mark speculation over unreleased / undiscussed features happens, so don’t be sad about something that was never there).
