Playing with Windows Live Photo Gallery
One of the really nice improvements in Windows Vista is the Photo Gallery. Now the photo gallery team have put out a beta, with some great new features and support for Windows XP. It took a while to sink in just what an improvement the new version is, but this morning I realized that we're using it more than Picasa (for the family part of the photo workflow — PhotoShop and LightRoom still rule for those of us that think we know what we're doing ;-) and also that it's spread onto all the boxes I use, both at work and home — we'll all except the Ubuntu box !-O
Some highlights...
- Auto adjust shows you what was autofixed — so you can tweak really really easily
- Integrated with Live so uploading to spaces is a breeze — I'd love to see flickr there too, but then who wouldn't?
- A superb stitcher — better than almost any of the others I've tried and the best bit? No UI. Proof that simple can be better.
I'm still stuck with the dilemma around destruction-less editing.
On the one hand, Picasa stores edits without altering the original image which is great for getting creative, and letting the kids have a go without worrying about destroying the original. But it is also a hassle because you need to export to e.g. share on flickr and, worse, locks most people into Picasa because other apps don't recognize the sidecar files that describe what's been done. On the other, I can't quite get used to having to save changes permanently with Photo Gallery, and on older hardware perf appears slower presumably because Picasa applies the edits only to the pixels being displayed, not the whole image.
Hummmmph. Oh for a perfect solution...
....;-)
