Photo Gallery, one of the newest Windows Live Essentials 2011 applications, is packed with more features than many other free image viewer tools on the market. Some of the new additions included in the latest version are: facial recognition for better tagging of people, photo fuse, geotagging, and caption insertion. Moreover, Photo Gallery is integrated with social services such as: Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and others. To get a better taste of what the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery has to offer, we will give you a screenshot tour of its coolest features.
Overall Interface Elements
Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to easily browse and view your images. Just go with your mouse over one photo to see a zoomed view of it.
The Photo Gallery application uses the ribbon that you may be accustomed to by using Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010.
Personally I'm a big fan of the ribbon and it should help increase the productivity of the people working with this application.
Image Editing Features
Photo Gallery has a lot of editing tools available that help improve your image with little effort: Noise reduction - automatically decreases noise, Red eye - reduces the red eyes effect, Retouch - removes minor imperfections, marks or blemishes from a photo, Straighten - horizontally aligns your photo, etc.
Photo Gallery allows you to apply different effects to your images: black and white, sepia, cyan tone, orange filter, red and yellow filter.
You can see below how the first four effects change an image.
If you don't like how an image looks like, you can always revert to the original.
Creating Images from Other Images
The Create menu allows you to make new photos based on the existing ones. If you took several images of the same landscape, for example, you can join them together in a panorama.
In this example, you can see a panoramic image made out of 2 images. Notice how the left part of the panorama is taken from the left picture, the middle is a mixture between the 2 originals whereas the right part comes from the image from the right.
Photo fuse, as the name suggests, allows you to merge 2 or more images into one where you can get the best out of each picture.
Select several images and create a movie out of them. This will open Windows Live Movie Maker. Add movie themes, animations and all sorts of cool visual effects like fading, mirroring, filters applied to images and many more. You can preview the movie you are creating, add title, caption and credits, music and even webcam video. More about what Windows Live Movie Maker is capable of in one of our future articles.
Adding Tags and Captions to Images
Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to tag people in your images for better identifying and sorting of photos. In the People tags panel you can see the list of all your contacts, from all the services you have integrated.
The more you tag, the easier it is for Photo Gallery to make suggestions for the people to be tagged. Using Batch people tag you can confirm and tag people based on the suggestions that Photo Gallery makes.
The Caption tool allows you to add some info to a picture.
Identify the place where the photos were taken using Geotag. While you type, geographical suggestions will appear.
Note: All the tags and captions you create will appear when you publish the photos using services like Facebook.
Sharing Images With Your Friends
Do you want to show your images to other people?Photo Gallery makes this task very easy: with one click, you can add your images as attachments to an email. Photo Gallery also offers integration with Windows Live Writer so you can post images directly to your blog. Connect Photo Gallery with Facebook, Flickr or other services to share images on your favorite websites. For Facebook, for example, you can choose whether to create a new album for the pictures you want to share or add them to an existing album.
Finding Your Images
Finding a specific image in more than one folder can be a time consuming task. That is why Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to specify a lot of searching criteria. Lookup a photo by the exact day, the month or the year it was taken. Find pictures by people tagged or by faces detected in them. Search by the rates and flags you have assigned to images, by the tags you have added, by whether the image was published or not, edited or not, by media type: photo, video or raw photo.All the search criteria you specified, will be displayed and you can easily manage them.
Importing Photos From Different Devices
Plug in your device - camera, USB flash drive or others - and use Windows Live Photo Gallery to review, organize and group items to import to your pictures library.
Creating Your Own Screensaver
Use photos from Photo Gallery to create a customized screen saver. Select photos with a specific tag, a specific rating, all photos from your gallery except those with a particular tag or, choose a folder from where photos and videos will be used.Further customize your screen saver by selecting an image theme: classic, fade, pan and zoom, black and white, sepia, album, spin and others. Choose a slide show speed and whether the pictures are to be shuffled or not.
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