Discover Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 In Screenshots

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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Discover Windows Live Messenger 2011 in Screenshots

We will continue our series about the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite with an article about Windows Live Messenger, one of the most popular programs included in it. The 2011 version brings a bunch of goodies like Facebook, My Space or LinkedIn integration. It also permits you to watch and share online videos and images, discuss with your friends using HD video chat and much, much more. This article is a feature tour with lots of screenshots in which I will give you a peek at Windows Live Messenger and its capabilities.

Where to Find Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger will start after you have finished installing Windows Live Essentials 2011 and, automatically, each time you start your computer. If you need to start it manually, there are several ways to find it. One option is to type 'messenger' in Start Menu's search bar and, under Programs, choose Windows Live Messenger.

Another option is to go to Start -> All Programs -> Windows Live Messenger.

Integrate Social Networks With Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger 2011 offers connectivity with 3 social networks: Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. This means that you can see your friends, their updates, chat with them, share photos and other links, tag your friends, share your status, add comments to posts and much more. After you log in to Windows Live Messenger with your Windows Live account, choose the social network that you want to connect to and provide the needed credentials.

Your friends' updates are divided into different categories. You can see the social highlights - the most relevant updates, the most recent ones, just your activities, only photo updates, videos, status messages or links.

To add a comment, all you have to do is press the '+' button of the appropriate post, write your thoughts and press Enter.

You can view videos directly in Windows Live Messenger without needing to open a browser window. If your friends shared multiple pictures they are shown as a slide show.

Set a status message that can be posted on both Messenger and any social network you want.

Notifications In Windows Live Messenger

You can choose to be notified on different occasions: when your friends log in, when someone sends you an IM, when you receive a new e-mail, etc.

If you are connected to different social networks, you will be notified each time your friends post something new. You can choose what updates you don't want to see by hiding all the posts from a specific person.

Choose your favorite friends, so you can see their updates first and contact them easier.

Interact with Friends in Windows Live Messenger

If you have friends that use Yahoo or Hotmail accounts, you can add them in Windows Live Messenger and chat with them.

When you're adding friends, mark the ones that matter most as favorites.

Right click a friend to send him/her an IM, an e-mail, see their photos or their social updates.

Your contacts from social networks are also visible. Select them to chat.
Choose the friends you want to see: all, just the favorites, the online contacts, those from Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace, etc.

Chat to your friends using video chat. Use a high-definition web-cam and go full screen to truly enjoy your conversation. If your friends are not around to chat, you can leave them a video message.

You can also share photos with your contacts.

Or watch an online video together while you chat.

Share a file by dragging it to your conversation window and the friend you are chatting with can download it.

Conclusion

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How to Install Windows Live Essentials 2011 Tools

Microsoft has launched at the end of September Windows Live Essentials 2011 - a package of 10 free programs: Messenger, Photo Gallery and Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Family Safety, Windows Live Mesh, Messenger Companion, Bing Bar, Outlook Connector Pack and Microsoft Silverlight. You might have used many of these tools in their older incarnations. With this pack you get the latest version of these programs, enhanced with lots of new features. In this article I will show all the steps you need to go through in order to install the tools in this suite and also share which are the system requirements.

System Requirements

The first thing you need to know before installing Windows Live Essentials 2011 is if your computer meets the requirements: Windows 7 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 installed, a minimum of 1.6 GHz processor, 1 Gb of RAM memory or higher, at least a 1024x576 screen resolution. In order to use Windows Live Movie Maker you should also have a video card that supports DirectX 9 or higher and Shader Model 2 or higher. I know it might sound like gibberish, so let me simplify. If you have a computer with Windows Vista Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 installed and your computer is not older than 2 years, most probably all the tools in this pack will work. If Windows 7 runs fine on your computer, these tools will work as well.

Upgrading from Windows Live Essentials 2010 to 2011

Our readers highlighted the fact that, upgrading from the 2010 version to 2011 via Windows Update doesn't work very well. It is best to uninstall the 2010 version, restart your computer and then install the 2011 version using the instructions below.
For more information on this topic, check out the comments below the article.

Install Windows Live Essentials 2011

Go to the Windows Live website and click Download now.

Double click the wlsetup-web.exe file that was downloaded to begin the installation. You can choose to either install all the Windows Live Essentials tools or choose a specific subset, according to your needs.

If you select the option 'Choose the programs you want to install' you will see the list of all the available programs. Check the box in front of a program if you want it installed and uncheck the boxes for the programs you don't want to install. If you already have one or more applications installed, they will be automatically updated. Press the Install button after you selected the applications you want.

You can see the installation progress in the window below. The installer will first download the applications you selected and then install them. Therefore, depending on your network connection speed, this can be a short procedure or a long one.

Click on the 'View details' button to see the installation percentage and the application that is currently installing.

You will be required to restart your computer when the installation completes. Save your work and close all applications before restarting your computer.

You can now use the applications included in Windows Live Essentials 2011. Go to Start -> All programs and you can find the shortcuts for: Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery.

If you go to Start -> All programs -> Windows Live, you will find the shortcuts for Windows Live Family Safety, Mesh and Writer.

NOTE: Microsoft Silverlight will also have its own folder in the Start Menu. Messenger Companion, Bing Bar and Outlook Connector Pack do not have shortcuts in the Start Menu. If you selected them and the installation processes completed without errors, it means they got installed. More information about these tools will be provided in future articles.

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Changing the Display Language Used by Windows Live Essentials 2011 Tools

While working with the applications included in the Windows Live Essentials package, I discovered that there are no options to change the display language in their configuration menus. That’s when I started to ask myself: how can this be achieved without having to uninstall the applications and reinstall them in a different language? To my surprise, making this change is actually not that hard - you simply need to search for the appropriate configuration options in a rather unexpected place: the Windows 7 Control Panel and make a few clicks. This tutorial will explain how this works.
NOTE: In order for this procedure to work you need to be logged on as administrator.
Open the Control Panel and go to ’Clock, Language, and Region’. Here, click on ’Windows Live Language Setting’.

This opens the ’Windows Live Language Setting’ wizard. By default, the wizard will show the language currently installed and in use for your Windows Live Essentials applications.
To see all the languages available for installation, click on the drop-down box which shows the current language.

From the list of languages, select the one you want to install and click OK.

Depending on the configuration of your Windows 7 operating system, a User Account Control (UAC) prompt might be shown. If that’s the case, click on Yes.

Now the installation procedure of the selected display language starts. Depending on your Internet connection, it can take from a few seconds up to a few minutes.

The wizard informs you when the installation of the selected display language is over. Click Close.

If you now start any of the Windows Live Essentials tools, the display language used is going to be the one you just installed. To change it again, you can repeat the same procedure.

Conclusion

The procedure for changing the display language used by the applications included in the Windows Live Essentials is not very complicated. The only ‘downside’ is that it cannot be done as you might expect: from the configuration windows of the application. You need to use the Control Panel from Windows 7 and go through the steps detailed above. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to use the comments form below. Also, to find out more about Windows Live Essentials, check out the articles recommended below.

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