Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta – A Tour:

Microsoft have just released a beta of their latest application: Windows Live Photo Gallery which is aimed at being a rival to applications such as Google’s Picasa2 and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition.

First Impressions:

The clean style of the installer for the new wave of Live betas is the first feature that is noticed:

This is a new approach to installers, and contains new philosophies such as not displaying the EULA unless you request it. I also find it less patronizing without being inaccessible for the less tech savvy.

When the program loads we see the new Windows Live colour scheme, a scary resemblance to WMP11 and, alas, it mimics Vista style buttons on XP.

The Views:

There are two main views, the details view and the thumbnail view. The details view allows you to see ratings and tags, whereas the thumbnail view maximizes the number of images on the page.

Thumbnail View.              Details View.

In this screenshot thumbnail view is shown with optional "Info Bar," toggled on/off with the "Info" button. This can be applied to either view.

Another feature available in the views is a live tooltip style preview, shown below.

Menu Options:

Below is a screenshot showing the menu options available for the pictures.

Integration:

This section can be split into two categories: Integration with other programs, and integration with other Windows Live services.

Integration with other programs simply allows easy access to open an image in other imaging programs on your computer (although seemingly not Picasa2):

Integration with other Windows Live services allows you to sign into Windows Live ID, and post photos directly to your Windows Live Space. The process of signing in and uploading photos is seen below:

Search:

Photo Gallery contains a search function (I think based upon Windows Desktop Search as this is one of the system requirements) that allows you to easily find photos based upon tags set by you, folder, name etc.

Tags & Ratings:

This screen gives allows you to organize your photos by tagging them, giving them a rating and adding a caption to them.

 

Edit:

Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta provides basic editing facilities including:

Cropping;

Red-eye reduction;

Colour Adjust;

Exposure Adjust.

Printing:

Printing is based on the Photo Printing Wizard, but I’ve put a few screenshots in anyway.

Other Features:

Other features that I haven’t paid any attention to in this post include:

Sharing by email;

Burning to disc;

Importing from other sources;

Screensaver

and

Slideshow.

UPDATE: Anyone who experience problems with the installer should visit here.