Comments

1. Brandon LeBlanc

   

   
   Posted on: November 08, 2007 at 7:17PM  

   kev_gordon, using my PowerShot SD750 I took several photos in a variety of views and rotations. I was able to get the final release of Windows Live Photo Gallery to automatically rotate photos.

   I am investigating this issue in regards to automatic rotation and EXIF right now. Let me post back in a bit.

   - Brandon
2. kev_gordon

   
   Posted on: November 08, 2007 at 7:38PM  

   Correct me if I'm wrong, but you may have used WLPG to import your pictures from the camera? In that case, I noticed a setting to automatically rotate pictues.

   However, I am talking about the thousands of photos I have already got stored on my hard drive, all of them with perfectly usable EXIF orientation information.

   To add another gripe - why does Vista's built in photo screensaver not use the EXIF info either? It's very frustrating.

   Sorry to whinge and moan at you - although it's just nice to have someone to vent my frustrations on.

   An update to my post about the tags - I just did some testing, it appears that it's only videos that have not carried the tag settings to the new version. Another bug!
3. RockLobster

   
   Posted on: December 04, 2007 at 5:58PM  

   Im not particularly impressed with this program it looks great with just a few sample photos and a neat little tag list to click on. That tag list isnt quite so little and neat when you finished tagging 4000 photos in fact its down right huge and not the simplest of tasks to trawl through that list to select the photos you want. The answer to this seemed to be the option to nest tags inside each other for instance my collection of classic car photos i nested their tags: Make/Model/Year/Color this shortens the list considerably but it has a side effect, the search no longer detects any of the tags that are nested. what is the point of being able to nest tags when the search no longer finds any tags that are nested ?
4. Jack Everett

   
   Posted on: January 02, 2008 at 1:07PM  

   What an amazing job you guys have done on the product.  Kudos and thank you from the bottom of my heart for such a great tool.

   Having said that, there's always room for improvement so here's my wish list. :)

   1. I want to use the Fix tools so bad, but I just can't bring myself to do it when I see my beautiful 3MB jpeg images getting saved after editing with a new file size under 1.5MB.  I'd love an option so I can set the compression, or at the very least just keep the compression at the same level.

   2. Many of my pictures have information in the Comments attribute.  I'd love to see this displayed with the picture along with the author.

   3. When displaying a single photo, I'd love one more line for displaying long titles.

   4. Face recognition would be cool, but not crtical.

   The only critical request is better control of the jpeg save compression.  Without this the Fix tools are off limits for me.

   Again, great job.  You guys are knocking this one out of the park IMHO.  Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.
5. chas1212

   
   Posted on: January 07, 2008 at 3:01PM  

   Help this is the first time on here so I hope I am doing this correct.

   I have a problem with pictures on my screensaver, when I first had vista I was able to use my pictures (picked randomly) for my screensaver and it would be full screen for each picture, for some unknown reason now the pictures are coming in at various sizes and some are real small. Any ideas help or whatever would greatly be appreciated.
6. Jeffc

   
   Posted on: February 01, 2008 at 3:26AM  

   This is probably a little off topic since it pertains only to Vista's Windows Photo Gallery, but I don't see a better place to post it, and I would have to guess it applies to the Live version too.

   Wikipedia alleges that Windows Photo Gallery does do lossless rotation.  My own experiments don't conclusively show this.  After rotating an image with Windows Photo Gallery, then opening the original and the rotated image with Photoshop CS2(Photoshop automatically opens the original in its correct orientation), I select all of the rotated copy and paste it into a new layer above the original.  Right-click on the new layer, select "Blending Options..." and change the "Blend Mode" to "Difference".  The image now turns black.  I flatten the image, then go to the Image menu, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast, and move the Contrast to +99.  The result is an exageration of the differences between the images, which, while not visible at zero contrast, are now clearly visible.  By contrast, if I start with the original, and copy and paste that into a second layer, perform the same difference/flatten/contrast adjustment, the result is still 100% black even at +99 contrast.

   I don't think this necessarily proves anything one way or another. The differences are so small, I think they must be computational error in either Photoshop or Windows Photo Gallery.  It does make me wonder though.
7. Reda

   
   Posted on: February 26, 2008 at 6:02PM  

   Really great application!!! Very Impressed! Few things:

   Documentation is really basic (official help, blog and everything)

   Roadmap on todo list: face regnonition, geotagging if any

   Wanted to know (hoping that someone will reply)

   * is rotation really lossless (just to confirm it 100% sorry)?

   * Really disappointed that the original is created as duplicate and saved in a completely unrelated folder (a subfolder would have been better like in picasa). Even better, it would have been nice to save the modifications in the metadata like in lightroom... if we could get this in the future, it would be great

   * Clear explanations on when existing exif data might not be read

   * it would have been nice to have "//" instead of "/" as a separator in tags.

   * Clear explanation on where the database is kept and what could be potential problems (i.e. if I modify an imported picture outside, is the change picked by WPG?)

   * Starting the slideshow is really slow. It would be nice also to get irfanview speeds when opening files from explorer. Currenty, that is also very very slow (Vista, Dual-Core Proc. T2130,1Gb Ram)

   * Have the possibility to import from folder in the import from "camera or scanner window". Sometimes, I put my pictures on an external hard drive and it's very difficult to import from there (need to copy back to memory! ;-(

   Possibility to change the background color to a dark theme like in lightroom.

   All in all however, I'm impressed! Thank you Microsoft
8. eisenworks

   
   Posted on: May 21, 2008 at 4:00PM  

   I've been looking hard at Windows Live Photo Gallery and Picasa, the problems of organizing photos, and the possibilities for getting more from my photos. I'm particularly impressed with WLPG's advantages for getting my photos organized.

   Bottom line:  I wrote some screencast tutorials on each of these programs. They take you through the programs' feature sets, with some emphasis on how they differentiate themselves. I set up the face-off here:  

   http://mainstream-guides.com/picasaVsWLPG">http://mainstream-guides.com/picasaVsWLPG

   You need to do a quick, free registration to see the longer tutorials:

   WLPG: http://mainstream-guides.com/WLPG

   PICASA: http://mainstream-guides.com/picasa
9. sparksteam

   
   Posted on: May 29, 2008 at 1:08PM  

   Is there an API into the Live Photo Gallery database such that a client can retrieve data from it? I would expect MS to follow the same model they always have, for example using MAPI to get at Exchange data.
10. Ben

    
    Posted on: November 02, 2008 at 9:50AM  

    HI. I use Kodak Easyshare and Live Photo Gallery. I update and edit in Live then use other options in Kodak that I like. IE: I update my file names and folders in Live and then they are updated in the Kodak software. They seem to work well while they're both open. Is this meant to be or should i be using only one program at once. Thank You.