Brief break from our travelogue for a bit of geekery. Two new technologies that I’m psyched to try out:
- My peeps back at Microsoft have released some of the features that I was working on when I was there, so I’m psyched to try it out for reals!
- I’ve been carrying a pocket GPS recorder that logs everywhere I go so it can generate exact maps of all of our movements each day and (this is the cool part) it can tag each photo with the exact location it was taken so they can all be viewed on a map.
OK, OK, quick travelogue for the day: we visited Nice. It’s a beautiful city, much nicer than Marseille (OK, had to get that pun out of the way). We spent the day visiting it’s absolutely gorgeous, clean, pebbled beach, wandering the winding little streets of its old section (Vieux Nice) and dining on its sumptuous fare. Nice day. Oops, guess I didn’t get the pun out of the way. Look, it’s hard to avoid.
On to geekery!
First, nice job DMX! With the latest release of the Windows Live Photo Gallery (a photo organization and editing tool) and Windows Live Spaces (a photo sharing service, kind of like Facebook or Flickr), you can:
- Upload your photos to Flickr with all the tags you set in the gallery intact
- Embed your photo albums in your blog as a Flash slideshow
- Set the permissions on your albums so only certain people can see certain albums
- Order prints right from the web site (of you or your friends’ photos)
- View slideshows full screen, not just tiny versions like Flickr
- Upload videos and embed them in blogs, too
With the simple, editing the photo gallery offers (crop, red-eye removal, lighten / darken, create panoramics, etc.), the quick viewing and organization, I really, honestly believe this sets up the Windows Live photo offering as the first class option in the field, because it’s got everything, end-to-end. The only other service that has both a local program for editing and organization and and on-line service for sharing is Picasa / Google, and I frankly think Windows Live offering is better (it’s easier / more intuitive to use, and it pushes the metadata into the file, where everyone can access it, instead of locking it up in a proprietary database).
And of course, if you’re a Flickr user, you can use the Windows Live Photo Gallery to edit and organize your photos, then use it to upload to Flickr.
And to be clear, I quit Microsoft, so I don’t have to say any of this. Nice work, y’all.
Here’s the same photo album as a Flickr slideshow and as a Windows Live slideshow. You decide which looks better.
And here’s a little video of the Nice beach, uploaded using the Windows Live Photo Gallery.
If you need a good program to edit, organize and share your photos, download the Windows Live Photo Gallery.
And, seriously, nice work y’all.
For the second bit of geekery, I used Locr to take my GPS log and assign locations to all my photos. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a pain to go back and retroactively apply the tags to photos I’ve already uploaded, so I’ll just show the photos from today on a map.
Also unfortunately, the GPS seems to lose the satellite signal every once in a while, so not all of my photos from today got geotaggeed, so I cheated and manually placed a few on the map. Here’s the map, as generated by Flickr.
Kind of lame. I’m going to keep experimenting with it. Hopefully, it will be more interesting when it’s not just a few shots of a shopping area.
