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Microsoft has launched the latest additions to Windows Live, its free suite of online services.
It comes with fun new tools such as Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Events, as well as enhancements to its popular services like webmail service, Windows Live Hotmail, instant messaging service, Windows Live Messenger, blogging and photo sharing service - Windows Live Spaces.
You can install the entire suite at www.get.live.com or just the products that you want. One ID and password is all you need for all your online services, and you can use your existing ID if you are already a Windows Live user.
The one that stood out to me was Windows Live Photo Gallery. It is a free upgrade to Windows Photo Gallery available in Windows Vista, that works with both Vista and Windows XP and provides easy management of photos and videos on the desktop with the power to easily share these online.
It comes with basic photo editing tools that allow you to enhance your photos by adjusting the colour and exposure, as well as simple cropping and red-eye fixes. Windows Live Photo Gallery automatically saves your changes but you can revert to the original anytime as a shadow copy has been created in the gallery.
“Windows Live Photo Gallery is fail-safe, you can undo stuff and it's really easy to manipulate things. And if you did something that you don’t like, it's really easy to undo,” said Mr Steven Birkhold, group manager for Windows consumer market.
A new feature that I found really neat is the Panoramic Stitch which allows you to stitch photos together to form seamless, panoramic shots in just a few clicks. I can now take tighter shots of skylines and stitch them together to get the complete picture.
Organising your photos and videos is a piece of cake. When they are imported from your digital camera, Photo Gallery organises them into events based on date and time. You can add captions, tags, ratings, then email them to your friends, burn to DVD, or publish them straight to your Windows Live Spaces.
Windows Live is also working with other partners that are outside the Windows realm such as online photo service, Snapfish - where you can print and develop photos, and have them delivered to you - and photo sharing website, Flickr, where you can publish your photos directly from Windows Live Photo Gallery.
"Flickr is a very popular, great photo-sharing website so we want people who use Windows Live Photo Gallery to be able to use Flickr if they prefer to use Flickr. If they're already there, we want them to try Windows Live Photo Gallery... to use it to provision their accounts and their sharing on Flickr," said Mr Birkhold.
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