If you haven’t already started to use the new Windows Live Hotmail, you may be missing out on some surprising and very cool features. One of my favorite features makes sending photos over email easier and classier than ever. The outstanding thing about Photo Mail is that it uses SkyDrive to store large photos and videos, which eliminates the need to attach files. Visuals of your photos are simply pulled from SkyDrive to provide a nice image in mail, though users are automatically directed to SkyDrive to view the full files. For anyone who sends photos frequently in mail, this will allow you to showcase a great looking set of photos for others to enjoy without clogging inboxes.
My 3 year old daughter Lil started to pick up photography as a creative interest while on a recent trip to Hawaii. I, somewhat hesitantly, let her borrow my camera to take some pictures and loved the results so much that I had to take a proud mommy moment and share them with all our family and friends. Using my Hotmail account, I simply clicked on “Photo Mail” and uploaded my favorite pictures from Lil. Here’s an example of the photo mail I produced – again, simple, clean and just 125 KB to send this album of 8 photos.
To get this particular view, I opened up my Hotmail account within Windows Live Mail, which provides several options for how you want to format your album in mail. And you can literally send hundreds of photos per mail – no matter what the image size – allowing you to showcase photo slideshows or video directly within your email. To test this, I also sent an album of over 100 photos from a friend’s 40th birthday party to all our friends. While I can’t show you all the pictures due to privacy, the email was only 47 KB!
To read more about the new Windows Live Hotmail and download it, go here.
One thing though which I would like to see in future versions is the ability to see photos stored in the email itself as attachments to be able to be viewed as a slideshow. I remember Outlook Express 5 had that ability. Please add that too. For attached photos, clicking a "Slideshow" button should directly start the themed slideshow in Photo Gallery! How wonderful would that be!! No need to "download" the photos any more.
Yes it looks gorgeous, however if you wish to send photo mail via the browser and not Windows Live Mail it STILL DOES NOT WORK in Google Chrome! Massive MASSIVE FAIL!!!
Sure I'm loving the IE9 beta but it's STILL not stable enough to use as my default browser and I have loved using Chrome for 2 years now! As this article shows too, I'm not the only one loving Chrome either: www.engadget.com/.../internet-explorer-falls-below-50-percent-global-marketshare-chr
SkyDrive is nice for those who want to store their photos in the cloud. However, if you poll your Hotmail customers, you may be surprised to find out how many wish to keep their photos locally (on their hard drive) and attach them to email.
The old version of Hotmail had the Photo Upload Feature. With Wave4, that feature was removed (granted, the Photo Upload Feature was 32-bit only, but it did have some nice functions that are no longer available).
Do you have plans to provide any of the missing functions/features (previously in the Photo Upload Feature) for those customers who wish to keep their photos locally?
I noticed that the moderators in the Windows Live Solution Center mentioned the option to "Send compressed photos". Yet, when I click the Photo option in the new Insert Bar, there is no choice to "Send compressed photos".
I posted a question about this in the Windows Live Solution Center, and received this reply:
"The option to send compressed photos is not available in EN-US and ES-US markets."
See this page:
windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx
Can you please tell me why the choice to "Send compressed photos" is not offered in the EN-US and ES-US markets (but is offered in other markets) ... and whether or not this choice will be offered to USA customers in the future?
7flavor, regarding slideshows we do this today. You just have to use Hotmail on the web. Windows Live Mail has a similar feature too.
littledictator: regarding your comments on support for Chrome, support for photo mail in Chrome is being rolled out in Windows Live Wave 4, so you should see this shortly. We're glad to hear that you're enjoying IE9 beta and thanks for your patience.
langware: Compressed photos is currently being rolled out and you should see this feature (if you haven't already) by the middle of October. For compressed photos, you just add attachments that are photos and you’ll see the compression option.
@Lisa:
You stated:
>Compressed photos is currently being rolled out and you should see this feature (if you haven't already) by the middle of October.
It has not yet been rolled out to my server (COL101), and today I saw this response on the Windows Live Solution Center from a Moderator:
"The Send compressed photos option is no longer available to the market in which your account belongs."
Can you please explain ... is the "send compressed photos" option going to be made available to ALL Hotmail users, or only to those in certain markets (and if so, in which markets)?
Latest response from a Moderator in the Windows Live Solution Center ...
"If your account's setting is not en-us(English language-US country) or es-us (Spanish language-US country) and you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox with IE tab browser, the "Attach photo" was replaced by "Send Compressed photos" under the new insert bar. Clicking this will launch the MSN Photo Upload Tool."
Some questions:
1. Why is there different versions of the Insert Bar for different markets (i.e., one for en-us/es-us and another for everyone else)?
2. Will the en-us/es-us market be given the "Send Compressed photos" option? If not, why not?
@langware -- you can still send compressed photos either as regular attachments or as linked photos on SkyDrive – you just need to install Silverlight to do so.