LiveSide - News blog : Photos

Windows Live Photos Improvements

Sunshine — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:51:00 GMT

As the number of megapixels in cameras increases, and making panorama pictures has been made easy with Windows Live Photo Gallery, it was time for Windows Live Photos to follow suit. Today a new release is being rolled out that bumps the limit on photo size up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels. And not just that, the image quality of photos has been improved too!

Furthermore, with today’s release, photo albums got faster to browse through, you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. How neat is that? Go and have a look!

For all you webmasters/bloggers out there: the Windows Live Photos team has also enhanced embedding images and photo albums into blogs and web sites. You get a real preview now rather than just an icon. Sharing just got better!

Windows Live Profile (April) update is here!

damaster — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:39:41 GMT

As announced one week ago, the newly updated Windows Live Profile has been rolled out to all users now! A summary of all the changes that were part of this update include:

20 new Web Activities, including Facebook, Digg, Last.fm, SmugMug and many more totalling 30 Web Activities you can add to your Profile. You can find the whole list at http://profile.live.com/WebActivities
3 new ways to add people to your Windows Live network, including importing contacts from Hi5, MySpace, and Tagged, in addition to the existing Facebook and LinkedIn contacts you may import from. You can start connecting with your friends on other networks using Windows Live at http://profile.live.com/connect
Contact search word-wheel, improved results when you’re searching for people on Windows Live from the Windows Live Home or Profile pages, as reported earlier
Photos Tagged of You, you’re now able to view all the photos that have been People Tagged of you, or your friends, on Windows Live Photos on a single page linked on your Profile
A new Windows Live Profile favicon

For more information check out Windows Live’s official announcement. You can try it out (if you haven’t done so already) at http://profile.live.com

Windows Live Photos integrates with FrameIt

damaster — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:09:53 GMT

We told you it was coming the last time we told you about the new Windows Live FrameIt, and we’ve seen FrameIt integrated with Facebook already. This time it’s Microsoft’s very own service that gets the integration – yes you heard it right you are now able to import your Windows Live Photos albums straight into your FrameIt collections!

As you’re signed in to your Windows Live ID, you’ll be able to add Windows Live Photos as one of the sources into your FrameIt collection. As shown above, FrameIt will pull a list of all your public albums from your Windows Live Photos for you to add to your collection and share it on a FrameIt-enabled photo frame.

Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns, you won’t be able to add any of your privately shared (or private) Photos albums and share them with your friends. This is particularly strange though as the integration with Facebook actually allow you to display your private photo albums (or photos tagged of you) on Facebook to a public FrameIt collection, of course, that is after you’ve authorized FrameIt to do so through Facebook Connect.

It is great to see more and more integration between Windows Live services (I hope to see FrameIt appearing on the header menus soon). What’s coming next? I hope it’ll be Flickr and Live Mesh integration. We’ll just have to wait and see as Microsoft rolls out more features to its new FrameIt service.

Visit Windows Live FrameIt here: http://frameit.live.com

Sneak peek of the new Windows Live FrameIt

damaster — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:06:29 GMT

Last week we reported the announcement that Windows Live FrameIt will soon to be updated with a Wave 3 theme, to have integration with Live Mesh, and soon to have a client and SDK released. Today we got the chance to see a sneak peek at the new Windows Live FrameIt. Unfortunately, the version we’re looking at doesn’t have Live Mesh integrated yet, nor does it have the client and SDK available for download. That said, we’re still seeing some new features and also the new look. Here’s what the new FrameIt home page looks like:

As you can see from the following screenshot, the left-hand navigation adds two new sections – Devices, where users can now register and set up their compatible photo frames and devices; and Downloads, where it provides the new SDK for partners and client download for power users.

Although we’re not seeing Live Mesh integration, the new FrameIt will also integrate with Windows Live Photos, with the ability to directly grab your photo albums stored on SkyDrive/Photos in your associated Windows Live ID.

The new Devices page also lists all the current partners that manufactures FrameIt-compatible digital photo frames. This page allow users quick access to link their photo frames with FrameIt. Of course, as Microsoft is still signing up with more new partners, expect this list to expand as time goes. There’s basically three ways in which any device (not limited to digital photo frames) can connect to FrameIt: via a specific frame Token; through a specific Feed ID (with a secret number) for your FrameIt collections; or through subscribing to FrameIt’s RSS feed address.

Unfortunately, the SDK and client are still unavailable for download. However, according to the website, the FrameIt SDK will “allow hardware and software providers to integrate FrameIt directly into their products”. What this means is that FrameIt has the potential to connect and display anything on the web onto your web-enabled device, anytime, anywhere, and better yet, it can be customised specific to your need (like time of day, frequency…etc).

Instead of directly competing with digital photo frame manufacturers, Microsoft had taken the first step to make FrameIt a platform for all device manufacturers to leverage on. It’ll be interesting to see what will be in the SDK and how Microsoft could expand the concept into this whole new field. The potential here is unlimited.

Windows Live Wave 3: Photos

damaster — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:48:00 GMT

The DMX (Digital Memories Experience) team at Microsoft who’s responsible for Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker made an announcement on their blog today following the release of Windows Live Wave 3 web services. Here’s what the team have to say about the new Windows Live Photos service:

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.

We’ll take a more in-depth look at this brand new service from Windows Live at http://photos.live.com

Windows Live Photos is actually built on top of Windows Live SkyDrive, hence the storage space of 25GB will also be shared with the files you store in SkyDrive. The initial Photos home page shows you the most recently updated albums you have, and also the “What’s New” feed that’s limited to the scope of your network’s Photos activities.

Going in to your album you’ll see large thumbnails of all your photos in that album, like the screenshot shown below:

Here you’ll be able to manage your photos, including changing the view to details, thumbnails, or icons. You can also download your photos using Windows Live Photo Gallery (not working at the moment, as Scott mentioned earlier), download everything in the album as a zip file, order prints from HP directly from here, edit viewing and editing permissions of your photos, and perform operations like rename, delete, copying and moving the photos between folders. If your album is set to public, you’re also able to view the RSS feed of the album and view the embedded code for your album to be placed on your websites.

Another new feature we have here is to view the album as a slideshow, powered by Silverlight. Pretty cool effects with the background glow colour determined from the photo itself. If you don’t have Silverlight installed, you won’t be able to see the thumbnails on the right as shown in the pictures below and there won’t be full-screen mode. Here’s what the slide show mode looks like:

Clicking on each of the photos in the album will let you see a larger image of your photo, together with options to allow you to download the photo and People Tag your contacts in your photo. It also display extra information about the photo, such as the caption, date taken, sharing permissions, dimensions, camera model, and the embed link. At the bottom it will allow other users (if the album is shared) to leave comments about your photo. Note that photo commenting can be turned off by going to Options.

The new photo upload tool, instead of using the legacy Windows Live Spaces one, it is now the same as the SkyDrive Upload Tool. If installed, users are able to drag and drop photos into the browser and upload them directly. However, with Windows Live Photos, users are able to choose whether to upload the photo in original size, large (1600px), or medium (600px). Notice that although the monthly maximum upload limit is removed, each file still has a limit of 50MB, although I don’t see why your photo would exceed 50MB.

One particular thing to note is that your original Spaces albums are automatically migrated to Photos. However, it actually requires one more step from you. You’ll notice that your old Spaces album will have the address ending in a sequence of letters and numbers, and that the thumbnails in your album aren’t as crystal clear and neatly organised as what was shown in the screenshots above. Windows Live Photos requires you to “update” the legacy album with a single click, as shown below. Following this, your album will have an address that actually ends in the name of the album, and the thumbnails will be neatly packed into square blocks.

Another interesting aspect for Photos is the “Home page photos”. This is a default album which allows users to upload the images/photos they wish to be placed on the upper-right hand corner of their Windows Live Home page. This is pretty neat and allows some extra personalisation to your homepage.

I won’t cover the photo sharing, permission, and files and folders moving/copying/renaming aspects of Photos as these are essentially the same as Windows Live SkyDrive, and Scott had provided a great review of these already. We will also cover the integration between Photos and Photo Gallery in the future once the “release candidate” of the Windows Live Essentials suite gets released.

In conclusion, this is a really neat improvement over what we originally had in Spaces. To experience Windows Live Photos yourself, go to http://photos.live.com and start uploading your favourite albums!

Update: Just some clarification, the Photos/SkyDrive storage space for Groups and Events is actually 5GB instead of each individual’s 25GB.

A note about Hotmail, SkyDrive and Photos storage space

damaster — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:00:00 GMT

In our previous posts covering the upcoming features in Hotmail and SkyDrive, we seemed to have missed some hints at possible Hotmail and SkyDrive integration. People have been asking for this for a long time, and now it finally seems possible in Wave 3. In the latest Windows Live documentations, it mentioned several details about the storage spaces that are available throughout Windows Live services:

Hotmail's minimum storage space will be 25GB and this will be ever-increasing as required at the end of each month, making it basically unlimited storage (subject to abuse control)
The ability to download e-mail attachments from Hotmail into SkyDrive - allowing these attachments to be shared with others or just kept private in your online folders
SkyDrive's storage space will also be 25GB, as reported previously, in addition to Hotmail's storage space
SkyDrive will allow uploading of up to 1000 new files stored per month - note that this only applies to newly uploaded files during that particular month, so total storage can well exceed 1000 files (it is unsure whether this also applies to Photos and those Hotmail e-mail attachments downloaded into SkyDrive)
Photos will utilize SkyDrive’s ~~5GB~~ 25GB of storage space for storage of full resolution photos. ~~(However this may be subject to change - at least we certainly hope so. Perhaps someone forgot to update it in the documentations?)~~ Update: From one of the demonstration videos by Brian Hall, it was shown that Photos does have the 25GB of storage shared with SkyDrive, not the previously reported 5GB. Looks like it was a typo in the documentations after all. Thanks to CKurt for pointing it out in the comments!

For many users, these storage spaces should be well enough for us to share files and photos with our family, friends, or colleagues. ~~Although we do hope that Photos can take advantage of the entire 25GB in SkyDrive instead of the reported 5GB.~~ What are your thoughts on this?

Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:38:11 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing an interesting referrer popping up in the stats for some of our posts. Turns out Microsoft moved their Wave 3 services from the dogfood servers onto beta servers, and as a result some MSFT employees were clicking through to us from http://home-beta.live.com. You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.

Note – as the new sites are locked down, these are just features we’ve spotted/inferred from looking around the existing sites that are running side-by-side. What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.

Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.

Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.

Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)

Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.

And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:

Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)

Let us know if you find anything: tips [at] liveside d0t net