Looks like it's
blowhard season up in Redmond these days, as the latest word from Microsoft on its Live Essentials suite of apps has been accompanied by the brash pronouncement that it's now markedly superior to Apple's efforts in Mac OS X -- at least when it comes to photos. This verdict was delivered by Brian Hall, General Manager for Windows Live, and is backed by a laundry list of new features we can expect by the holiday season of this year. Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker will soon be able to link up directly to sites like Flickr, Facebook and YouTube -- which will allow for painless uploads as well as pulling in any additional tagging done on Facebook. New photo stitching and retouching abilities, along with face recognition (rather than mere detection) are also being touted, but the ultimate arbiter of the new software's utility will obviously be the real hands-on experience for users. We shouldn't have to wait too long for that, as a beta version of the freely downloadable (on Vista and 7, XP holdouts are no longer being served) suite should be making the rounds in the coming weeks.
posted June 3rd 2010 6:57AM
@palegolas
Hahaha...Real Artists Ship!!!!!!
I'm one of those XP holdouts and I'm still holding out.
Nice try getting me to buy 7 though MS.
@Shooter McGavin
Call me a blind Apple Queer Steve Jobs Lover Minimalist Hippy iSheep if you must, but...
um...Seriously? You're sticking with a 10 year old operating system instead of Windows 7? Aren't you kind of... cutting off your nose to spite the face?
WTF is with this video? What is it supposed to be? Is it too hard to show us the thing in action? I understood it until the point where it was putting different people in the same photo. Does it do it automatically or do we have to painstakingly semi-automatically "select" them?
The killer feature which the software should implement is easy backup to MS cloud servers.
They happily give plenty of free space in various projects but most all are crippled in some way - can only put up a file and not a whole directory, for instance.
What would be great is if I could have it backup all my crap to their cloud and then if my hard drive goes 'poof', when I get back up and running I log in and tell it I want backup recovery and it pulls all my crap down onto my hard drive from their cloud.
Picasa/Picasa Albums also needs this added. Google will give plenty of cloud space real cheap if not totally free. But also lacks the tools to really use it simply and effectively.
I don't know if apple has this or not - but then they really should since they are the one that charges like $100/year for cloud services you can get elsewhere for free.
I don't know why people starts to make photographers into the discussion, I thought photographers use Aperture or Lightroom, and Photoshop, not iPhoto or Microsoft Gallary ...
@pcfishhk
I agree, for any work I'd do with photos, I'd want a dedicated application for just that. I can't expect bundled feature software to take care of the kind of work good ole' Photoshop can pull off. CS4 owns.
@Schmerzlichtod
If you ever thought iPhoto was meant for professional photo editing, I'm sorry, but you've sorely misunderstood the point of the iLife suite.
Better? what is your argument? Windows? the Zune? what?????
I already thought the Windows Live Photo was better than iPhoto, and while I don't think Windows Live Movie Maker (or whatever they are calling it these days) is as full featured as iMovie, it sure is a lot easier to use. Thank you Apple for all the wonderful competition.
"Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker will soon be able to link up directly to sites like Flickr, Facebook and YouTube"
it already does that now