March 30, 2010

Windows Live W4: Photo Gallery

Ah, if only Windows Live Startup Experience managed to get the message across over to Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Hiding the ribbon once more, we once again get that clean feeling we're starting to appreciate in Wave 4. It's too bad the Quick Access Toolbar only has undo and redo buttons by default. The application took no time at all to load up the pictures and videos we have stored in the default folders on this machine.

Here's the File menu. If you'll recall previous Windows Live leaks, those orange circles are placeholders for icons that have yet to be finalized.

The options window for Photo Gallery doesn't have the tabs on the left-hand side, maybe that's because there are only three. Nothing too crazy in here (though face detection is a go!), but it's always a good place to start before you choose to use the application full time.

Here are the five tabs of the ribbon. We're thinking this one will be changing a lot more than the other ones during the beta lifecycle. It won't be just new icons. Looping back to the face detection part for a second: under the Find tab you can either choose Top People, the most commonly tagged people in your gallery, and All People. Once there, you can click on that person’s thumbnail and create a search filter which shows all photos that contain that person. Furthermore, you can also add location information to photos and filter through them in the same way.

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