The new Windows Live Photo Gallery is the best place to organise, edit and manage your photos.
Photo Gallery will take care of all your photos, whether they're taken from your mobile phone or your high-res camera. They can be uploaded fresh from the weekend or imported from old image folders that have been sitting on your hard drive.
From the minute you download your photos from your camera or phone, Photo Gallery will manage your pictures by grouping them in to folders. This allows easier access for future editing, such as cropping or retouching photos taken in low-light, and, best of all, one-click buttons to share across e-mail and even Facebook.
Managing your photos
Get started by downloading your photos into Photo Gallery from your camera or phone. If they're already on your hard drive just drop and drag the ones you want.
Once they're all there, it's easy to sort them into folders and groups. Create folders and group similar photos all in the one place so you know where to find them when you need to. Photo Gallery's new facial recognition technology (yeah, we think it's definitely one of the cooler features) combined with some new tagging options makes finding and sorting photos easier than ever.
Edit your photos
Play around with the one-click editing tools to make the photos exactly the way you want them. The new Photo Gallery works as a stand-alone photo editing and presentation suite, but it also gives you a range of inventive and fun options — options that aren't offered by other photo-sharing products.
We'd be silly not to shine the spotlight on the new "Fuse" tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to grab the best parts of numerous photos and fuse them into one incredible shot. It's cutting-edge stuff and the best bit is you don't need to be a veteran graphic designer to make it work.
There's a host of other tools that allow you to get the most out of your shots. Autofix is one such tool that allows you to finetune the smaller details of your photos for things like brightness and contrast.
Share your photos
Now that your photo uploads go straight into SkyDrive, you can choose who gets to see your pics. Alternatively, you can open the file up to share with everyone. When a friend visits your profile in Windows Live, they've got a whole lot of options when it comes to viewing and sharing your photos.
For example, through your photo page they can select a gallery and download all the photos, straight away.
When you're done why not send them straight to your Facebook or MySpace page? Utilise the one-click buttons from within Photo Gallery and your friends will know what you're up to in no time.
You can also share your photos in real-time with your friends by dropping them into a Messenger chat, whenever you like.
If all that isn't enough to keep you busy, grab you newly created galleries and jump across to Movie Maker; there's a whole heap more you can do there. Add credits and a backing track with Movie Maker's AutoMovie themes or spend a bit more time adding a freeze frame or slow-mo to those great action sequences. So go on, get Photo Gallery and get creative.
Look for this update and many more over the coming weeks as we start delivering them to the Essentials suite.
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