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:

1. 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.
2. 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.