Piloting in Seattle, San Francisco and New York, when you check-in at selected locations you’ll receive tips from professional photographers on where to shoot the coolest photos and how to go about taking them.

For example, check-in at Fort Point, San Francisco and you’ll receive the following tip, “From the right side of the parking lot there is a great vantage of the Golden Gate Bridge. Get low and try to capture one of the rusty chains in the chains in the foreground with the bridge in the background”

Over on the Windows Experience Blog, Harrison Hoffman tells the story of how the tips were generated. He travelled across each of the cities with leading local photographers scouting a wide variety of spots in each of the three cities, including famous tourist landmarks as well as other locations off the beaten track.

Sounds like a very cool way to explore some of America’s great cities – even if you’re a local, the tips may well help you see your environs in a brand new light. Fingers crossed more cities are included over time.

Also, thanks to the new feature that allows you to publish a series photos directly to Photosynth (Create menu –> More Tools –> Create a Photosynth), the geotagged option will allow the synth to be rendered and then placed on Bing Maps. Then all you would have to do to finish your synth is add a title, tags, and a description.

To get the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery which supports this feature, just head over to the Windows Live Essentials beta homepage here and hit the “download now” button.

(via the Bing team blog)

In Photo Gallery, the upload option appears under Publish –> More Services while in Movie Maker a new button called “Publish on Web” offers the option from its menu.

If you’ve been a fan of the YouTube plugin in the past, you’ll now need to download this critical update in order to continue to use it. Due to a change in YouTube’s hashing algorithm, you’ll no longer be able to authenticate and login to YouTube with the older plugin. Instead, you’ll need to download the updated release (1.1) from the CodePlex site here. There are no other features or updates in this new version besides the one bug fix.

Unfortunately, until now, if you uploaded your creations to Windows Live Photos on the web, the site couldn’t display them properly if they were in their original size. But as of Thursday, September 10th, this is no longer an issue. The Windows Live Team is rolling out a new release of Windows Live Photos that bumps up the limit on photo size so that you can now get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels.

The new release also increases the image quality of all photos on the site, enhances image and album embeds, and makes browsing photo albums faster. And you can browse through albums with the arrows on your keyboard now, too. To try the new features for yourself, head over to Windows Live Photos.

When you click that link, a box pops up where you can select and de-select the photos you want.

Then Photo Gallery starts the download. When finished, it even takes you right to the new photos in the Photo Gallery application. How handy!

It seems like this is a great alternative to emailing photos around – as long as the recipient uses Photo Gallery too. It really couldn’t be any easier.

But unlike the panoramic technology that runs in WLPG, the ICE software provides a few extra features, too. The most important one is the orientation tool. With this, you can change the orientation of a photo to give the impression that a tilt/shift lens was used. For example:

You could also use a perspective projection instead of a cylindrical one with the tool. Example:

Or you could set the mid-point of a 360-degree panorama:

ICE also adds a variety of export options including Deep Zoom and HD View. Use ICE to export to either of these two options and it will generate a web page that handles viewing these images in a much more efficient manner (they tend to be very large images by default).  For Deep Zoom photos, the web page will use Silverlight to allow for interactivity with the image. HD View is like Deep Zoom but also adds some extra affects – it can rewarp the panorama on the fly using a fish-eye lens, auto-exposure adjust for looking into those deep shadows of the panorama, and it will support wide-color-gamut monitors. HD View is still more experimental technology and will require a special plugin. You can get it here.

Add to Photo Gallery!

Now you can take this advanced ICE photo manipulation technology and integrate it into Windows Live Photo Gallery. Just download it and install it. You’ll then see a new menu item in the WLPG “Extras” menu:

To use ICE, simply select a group of images and then launch it using the new menu item.

(via Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)

When you’re viewing a photo album in Windows Live, there’s an option at the top to “Send a Link.” You may think that this will open up whatever email program you use or move you into your Windows Live Mail/Hotmail, but actually, it’s just a feature of the service.

When you click the link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter in the email addresses of those you want to share the pictures with. The form has a nice auto-complete feature which will automatically fill in their information if you have those folks saved in your contacts (at people.live.com or within your Windows Live Mail/Hotmail).

However, if you’re always sending photos to the same group of people – like those in your family for example, you should go ahead and create a list. Go to people.live.com and click on the “Category” drop-down. From there, create a new category and add people from your contacts to that list.

Now whenever you’re on the “Send a Link” page, you can just click the checkmark next to that list. Click “Send” when you’re finished and your family, friends, co-workers, or whoever it was you shared with will receive an email from Windows Live alerting them to your new photos. And, assuming you leave the bottom box checked, they won’t have to sign in with a Windows Live ID in order to view them – they can just click the link in their email.

When you go to upload photos with LiveUpload version 2.0, you’re given the option to link a particular Photo Gallery tag with a Facebook user. The links you make are saved, so you only have to configure each tag one time. Future uploads will automatically link the correct tags to the correct people.

Facebook users – this one is a must.

You can get the updated software from here.

After installing Windows Live Photo Gallery (a part of the new Windows Live Essentials suite) on two computers, you can then set them up to sync with each other. To do so, click Setup gallery sync…from the File Menu in Photo Gallery and follow the instructions provided. (You’ll need to be signed in with your Windows Live ID first).

In addition to syncing the photos themselves, the software also syncs your history of edits.

Sync currently will work with up to 20 synchronized folders containing up to 20,000 files each.

Last month, a refresh of the Windows Live software (build 14.0.8051.1204) added this feature to your Windows Live Photo Gallery program. You should now see the option in the top right side of the window when you’re uploading pictures:

Of course, if you’re concerned about space (although with 25 GB of free storage that shouldn’t be an issue for a while!), you can always choose to compress the pictures to the “Large” or “Medium” sizes instead.

When you’re done uploading your pictures to your online photo gallery at photos.live.com for safe keeping, don’t forget that you can also use this software to upload directly to Flickr (that’s built in), to Facebook (via this plugin), to SmugMug (via this plugin), or you can send your videos straight to YouTube (via this plugin).

If you’re having a conversation with someone, you can go to the Files menu and choose “Send a file or photo.” However, if you would rather make file available online for them to download from SkyDrive (and perhaps make it available to several others at the same time too, even if they are not online), you can go to Files –> Publish Files online from your conversation window.

If you choose that option, you’ll be taken to your SkyDrive on Windows Live where you can upload your file(s) and choose the people you are sharing the files with.

Even if you’re not in a conversation, you can quickly access your SkyDrive from Windows Live Messenger from the “Actions” menu. Just click “View your online files” to be directed to your SkyDrive homepage.

Using SkyDrive with Live Messenger is a great way to share both individual files, photos, or entire photo galleries with your friends and family when you’re chatting online. You can even share files publicly with your whole Windows Live network or the world by sharing them on SkyDrive and choosing those options from the drop-down box. Your shared files will then get posted to everyone’s What’s New feed. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

So What’s New?

Insert Multiple Photos: One of the new features you’ll notice in Live Writer 2009 is the ability to insert multiple photos and Windows Live Photo albums. With this, you can easily insert several photos at one time. Because of Live Writer’s tight integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can also insert the photos and have them sent directly to your Live Photo Gallery upon publishing. Alternately, you can select photos from an existing album to add to your post.

Search Your Drafts: If you keep a lot of unpublished posts handy for when you have blogger’s block, you’ll be glad to know that the new version of WLW has an integrated search feature which lets you search through your old drafts by keyword.

Tag Suggestions: For those of you who tag your posts in your WordPress blogs, the new tag suggestions feature will auto-suggest tags as you begin to type. Now you don’t have to worry about tagging things incorrectly or creating near duplicate tags.

Insert and Publish to YouTube: Video bloggers - if you hadn’t yet discovered this feature before, you’re going to love it. From the Insert –> Video option, you can browse for a file on your computer and have it automatically upload to YouTube or Soapbox upon publishing. How convenient is that?

New Plugins: The version of WLW supports plugins, all of which can be found at the Windows Live Gallery web site. If you haven’t already added these plugins, they are definitely must-haves:

• FLICKR UPLOAD
  Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.
• DIGG THIS
  Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
• TWITTER NOTIFY
  Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

According to the Live Writer team blog post, the complete list of new features in this version includes the following:

• “Instant photo” border treatment
• Insert multiple photos
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Improved blog account setup
• Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Support for bidirectional languages
• Updated look and feel

When you click the “Add Photos” link for the first time, you should see a message prompting you to “install the upload tool” for faster and easier uploads. You’ll definitely want to do this as it sure beats having to browse for each photo individually. To install the tool, just click the link highlighted in yellow.

In the pop-up that appears, you can either click “Run” or you can click “Save” to download the installer to your PC instead: 

The upload tool will then begin to install. Vista users will need to authorize the tool to run by accepting the UAC prompt that appears. After installation, you’ll see the Windows Live Photos “Add Photos” page now looks different. Where before there were boxes that let you browse for files, there’s now a big white space that says “Drop Files Here.”

Now, to add files, you just drag and drop them from the folder on your PC right to the empty box on the web page.

(If you change your mind, and decide you would rather browse for files instead, you can still do so using the link below the box.)

Once you’re done adding files, just click the “Upload” button.

Notice, though, that there’s a drop-down box that allows you to pick the photo upload size in the top-right corner of the Upload Tool. If you would prefer your photos be uploaded in their original sizes, you’ll want to use this tool instead of Live Photo Gallery, which does not let you choose the size. From the drop-down box, you can select Large, Medium, or Original, depending on your preference.

That’s it! After the upload completes, your photos will be available on Windows Live Photos.

What I found to be the easiest way to get my nice organized folders from my PC into Windows Live Photos was to use Windows Live Photo Gallery. This desktop software program (available from download.live.com), is a part of the new Windows Live Betas, a set of desktop tools that integrate with the online version of Windows Live.

STEPS

1) From within Windows Live Photo Gallery, I simply navigated to the folder which contained the photos I wanted to publish using the explorer-like navigation bar in the right sidebar.

2) Then I selected all the photos using my favorite keyboard shortcut for “Select All” – Ctrl + A. (You can also go to File –> Select All from the menus at the top.)

3) I right-clicked on the photos I selected and chose the option “Publish on Windows Live Spaces” from the menu that appeared. That should probably say “Photos” now, but whatever, it works.

4) After you do that, a window will appear where you can fill in the new album title for your selected photos. Take note of the drop-down box underneath as it’s here where you can set permissions. By default, the permissions are set to be “Same As Space,” meaning whatever you configured in Windows Live Spaces will be the permission setting applied to the photos unless you specify otherwise. If you’re not sure, or you just want to be certain the correct permissions are applied, you can click on the drop-down box and select either “Permission: Public” (viewable by everyone) or “Permission: Just You (viewable by ONLY you).

5) Finally, just click “OK” and the photos are uploaded into Windows Live Photos. Despite the wordiness of my instructions here, the whole process is actually very fast – you can upload tons of albums in minutes.

For anyone with a lot of photos, this is definitely the way to go instead of using the built-in photo uploader  in Windows Live Spaces which requires you to browse and select each individual photo you want to add one-by-one. 

Now if you combine that storage provided by Windows Live with that of Live Mesh, you can grab 5 more gigs of free online storage. Although there’s no limit to the size of files that can be synced via peer-to-peer between computers and mobile devices, the Live Mesh Desktop – an online access point for getting to your files - only provides 5 GB of online storage (for now, that is).

If you’re going to use both services, you may want to come up with a strategy as to where you’re keeping your data – which service holds what? Given the combined 35 GB between Windows Live and Live Mesh, you can practically use these services as an alternative to backing up your computer – well, almost. They may not be as complete as a true online backup which backs up your computer’s system state data, too, but they can definitely help.

Photos uploaded with this plugin can be added to an existing album on Facebook or they can be added to a new one you create on the fly. You can even use the plugin with multiple Facebook accounts – which is perfect for those families who share one login on the home’s PC.

If you're interested in building your own plug-in, there’s a development resource page  on the Windows Live Digital Memories Experience Team. Also, check out the Windows Live Photo Gallery Publishing Plug-in Platform Overview over on MSDN and the Sample Plug-in for Flickr.

The LiveUpload for Facebook plugin also works in the beta version of Windows Live Movie Maker, too. If you want to download the LiveUpload for Facebook plugin, just click here.

From the Photo Gallery, you'll find the plugin under Publish > More Services.

When using the plugin, you can configure multiple YouTube accounts and select the one you want at the time of publishing. You can enter in the video Title, Description, and Keywords in the boxes provided and choose both the Category and the Permissions level from the drop-down lists. Click “Publish” and your video is sent directly to YouTube. What could be easier? You can get this plugin from here.

The online service mirrors some of the functions of the desktop software – for example, you can tag people in your photos, tag yourself, or rename the photo's title. However, the online gallery also provides new features like the ability to add comments to the photos or copy an embed code for posting your photos elsewhere on the web. There’s a photo URL provided, too, if you just want to link to the photo itself.

Through Live Photos’ privacy controls, you can specify who, if anyone, has access to your photos and what they can do – view, edit, delete, download, etc. 

One of the best features in the new service, though, is definitely the photo slideshow, which you can launch at anytime from the “More” menu. The slideshow is easy to click through with its navigation buttons at the bottom or you can let it auto-play. When you're finished viewing the images, you can easily return to your photo gallery either by clicking the link provided or just hitting “escape.”

The new Live Photos service will also be available from the new Windows Live homepage, also announced today.

The new Live Photo Gallery actually has a built-in “Straighten Photo” feature. To use this feature, select your photo and click on the “Fix” button in the top toolbar. Then, just click the “Straighten Photo” option. Your picture will automatically straighten itself out! And if you need to fine-tune the adjustment, you can optionally use the slider to adjust the angle. Just move the slider to the right to rotate the picture clockwise and move it to the left for counter-clockwise. The grid that appears can help you align your photo perfectly.

Here’s an example of both the before and after (see below).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

(Thanks to Arwa Tyebkhan for this tip…and example photos!)

If you haven’t tried Photosynth yet, give it a shot! This amazing application lets you stitch your pics together to create panoramic images like you wouldn’t believe. Laura has a great instructional video to help you get started: check it out.

The most exciting new addition to Live Photo Gallery is facial recognition. Of course I had to check this feature out right away. Now when you’re viewing a photo, Live Photo Gallery recognizes the people in the photo and draws a box around their face so you can identify them with the new “people tags.” What’s really clever about this new feature is the way it integrates with Windows Live Messenger. If you’re signed into Live Messenger, you can scroll through your Live Messenger contact list, which appears as a drop-down next to the person’s face when clicked. You can select their name from the list that appears. If your contact  list is long, you can also search the list just by typing in the search box at the top. If the person in the photo isn’t in your contacts, I found the easiest way to identify them is to just type their name into the search box anyway and then click the “add new person” option. This adds them to your list of people to choose from in the future.

You can also identify people quickly just by selecting the pictures that they’re in and clicking "add a people tag." Since I was already so organized as to have a whole set of photos in a folder with the person’s name (I know, that's crazy!) I was able to select “Ctrl” + “A” to select all photos of a person and then add the people tag to all the photos at once.

From Live Photo Gallery, you can share photos directly on the Windows Live Photos web site (part of Windows Live Spaces). If any of your contacts have photos shared publicly, you will see them within Windows Live Photos and you can even download them into your own albums if you so desire.

In addition to publishing on Windows Live Photos, you can also publish photos to Flickr, or any other web sites that offer a plugin (more on that later) via the “more services” option from the right-click menu. 

Overall, the new software offers a much-improved update to the older version of Live Photo Gallery and is definitely worth the upgrade. You can get this and all the Windows Live updates from download.live.com.

With the Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can quickly and easily add tags and ratings. If this is the first time you've installed the program, you will probably want to go through the pictures already on your computer and add some tags to them. This can be easily done by  clicking on the group of photos listed under the Tags section as "Not Tagged." You can then select a picture, or use Ctrl or Shift to select multiple photos and then "Add Tags" on the right side of the gallery. As you add tags to photos, your most recent tags will appear as you start typing in a tag, making it that much easier to tag a photo. The next time you import pictures, you can tag them on their way in - there are more details on the import process here.

In the Live Photo Gallery, you can also click on the star ratings, which are located above the tags in the right side column in the gallery to assign ratings to your photos. At the bottom right there is an option to add a caption to the selected photo.

But what you may not realize is that the tags you assign to your photos don't just help you locate and organize the pictures on your computer, the data is passed on to other services that support the metadata, too. A good example of this is flickr. By right-clicking on a photo or photos in the gallery, you'll see a "More Services" option. Click that and select "Publish on flickr." When you publish your photos on flickr, your tags and captions are supported and will be transferred automatically to Flickr, saving you from having to tag them again on the web service. But flickr isn't the only thing that supports the Photo Gallery Metadata. Since Windows Live Photo Gallery supports a type of metadata called XMP, programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, iView MediaPro, Extensis Portfolio, and lots more support XMP, too.

Professional photographers may want to have even more interaction with the metadata, so for them, there is the Microsoft Photo Info tool. The tool is a software add-in for Windows that allows you to add, change, or delete metadata properties from inside Windows Explorer. It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photos in the Windows Explorer Details view.

Using the Microsoft Photo Info tool, you can edit images individually, or as a collection, quickly recall recent entries and location details, generate copyright notices automatically, correct EXIF capture date/time info, view EXIF properties, and preview images by double-clicking the photo's thumbnail.

(Source: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)