Lots of news today going around the blogs about the addition of Flickr publishing to to the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta. Check out LiveSide, I Started Something, The Microsoft PhotoBlog and Windows Live Wire for their perspectives.
I installed it this morning while riding in on the bus (got to love bus service with wireless Internet). After installing, this dialog box absolutely made my morning.
Why?
I've been a Flickr user for a long time. Long, long before they were acquired by Yahoo! I take a lot of photos and Flickr has become my photo cloud. I love the "community media" experience of Flickr. I share photos with friends, families and experience other peoples photos through tags. That's community media to me and I love it.
The local desktop experience for Flickr sucks though. Sure there are many applications and tools for managing my local photos, uploading to Flickr and a backup tool in Java. There is even a official Flash based organizer. None let me manage my tags locally, leverage my local processing power and are just too slow.
I want to do these activities locally and on my local network. With the Live photo gallery I can now properly tag my photos on my Vista machine. With this I maintain a single set of metadata between the photos on my local network and the photos in Flickr . I also can now use those photos with Media Center and my XBox 360 extender. Finally I can ensure the photos are backed up to my Home Server.
There is a lot of significance in the Vista/ Windows Live Photo gallery's tagging system. Jon Udell has covered a fair on this via his screencasting efforts. I think a lot of Flickr users will want to go check those screencasts, as they get up to speed with the Live Photo Gallery.
To install the beta I completed two steps:
- First I installed the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta. The Windows Live Services recently received a common installer, that has a really nice user experience. You can pick and choose other services that you want to install or just install the Photo Gallery.
- The photo gallery that was installed from the beta site did not have the Flickr functionality. I suspect this is just a matter of the team deploying updated bits to the download site and soon they will have the version in the initial download.
I am glad I didn't get the updated version though, as I had a pleasant surprise. Moments after installing the gallery, Microsoft Update automatically had a the latest version of the gallery drizzled to my machine with the Flickr functionality. Very seamless. That's cool, I didn't realize the Live services, once installed would get updated via Microsoft Update. That only makes sense though. :-)
Great day.
Let me know if you use the updated Windows Live Photo Gallery.
