Pros & Cons
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- Good organization of photos.
- Easy uploading to online photo galleries, including non-Microsoft sites.
- Automatic face tagging.
- Excellent panorama creation.
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- No geotagging.
- No help with screen captures.
- People tagging trails Picasa's equivalent.
- Limited slideshow and special photo-effect options.
- No blemish remover.
- Unsupported camera RAW formats.
Windows Live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) beta Specs
| Free: | Yes |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Personal |
Microsoft Windows 7 won't come preloaded with the photo-editing software found in
At first glance, the main interface looks much like that of Vista's Photo Gallery. There's a navigation panel on the left that lets you access images by folder, date, People tags, and Descriptive tags. In the center are your gallery picture icons. On the right is an activity pane for tagging, displaying photo info, or editing. The menu buttons along the top have been redesigned to have a softer look, and the Info button is particularly useful for showing a photo's tags, size, exposure data, camera type, and more. A search bar quickly filters the gallery down to thumbnails of files whose names or tags contain characters you've typed.
Like Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery doesn't let you just choose File | Open and directly open an image file. Instead, you add any folders containing pictures for viewing in the program—by default the obvious locations like My Pictures and its subfolders are included. The date view is particularly useful, letting you narrow your image selection more precisely than you can with the similar Picasa feature, which groups folders by year. In Photo Gallery, you can view images from particular months and dates, which I like, but you won't find the Timeline view you get with Picasa. Neither product's solution is as good as the Events view in
Fixing Pictures
Photo Gallery's editing features are adequate, but, aside from its impressive panorama tool, it lacks the competition's fancier capabilities. You'll find all the standard consumer photo-editing tools—cropping, lighting adjustments, red-eye correction, image straightening, and an auto-adjust option that gives the photo a one-click fix. Note that as with Picasa, you can undo any edits (the application creates a backup of the original), but you can also tell the app to discard originals of edited pictures, too, after a set time. This can be a handy way to reclaim space gradually if you do a lot of edits.
When you use auto adjust, sliders for the individual adjustments—brightness, contrast, shadows, highlights, color temperature, tint, saturation, and sharpen—drop down. These show you what the automatic control has done and let you manually tweak its work. Digital darkroom junkies—or just folks who want to cut out the brightest or darkest tones—will like the histogram editing tool.
Red-eye correction works well, though it's not as slick as Picasa's, which, with one click, finds and fixes all red eyes in a picture. In Photo Gallery (and iPhoto) you have to draw a box manually around each eye you want to fix. You won't find a blemish remover, either—a feature both iPhoto and Picasa offer. Nor are there the many fun effects other photo editors include—for example, iPhoto's antique or Picasa's film grain and graduated tint. And the latter's ability to add a highly configurable text overlay again sends it to the head of the class.
One Photo Gallery feature that beats both iPhoto and Picasa is panorama creation—neither offers a way to combine extra-wide landscapes into one image. When I fed Photo Gallery two pictures from a Greek island mountaintop, I got a virtually seamless wide scene.
People in Pictures
One of the coolest new Photo Gallery features is People tagging. If a picture includes a face, you can have the program find it and associate it with a person's name or Windows Live ID. But unlike Picasa, with its name tags feature, Photo Gallery won't scan your library to find more pictures of a person you've identified. Photo Gallery will identify faces only in the galleries or images you select and display them individually.
After People-tagging a face in a picture, whenever you hover the mouse over the face, a caption with the name appears, and you can click to display all the pictures you've tagged as that person. Since the software can find and let you identify multiple faces in a single photo, you can select more than one person's name, and display all photos that contain either or both individuals.
I had some problems with this feature, however. For one, if there's a stranger in the background, clicking on the "More people found" link brings you back to the picture and asks you to identify him. You can hit the Next button, but you can't tell the program to ignore that face. What's worse, a couple of times the program identified non-human objects as faces—the front of an old car, in once case, and a small area in a pile of leaves in another. The app needs a "this is not a face" button.
Picasa's Name-tag feature did miss some visages but never identified non-faces as belonging to people. I also like Picasa's head-and-shoulders icon, which lets you instantly display just pictures with faces, but name tags are a feature only of online galleries—you can't name-tag from the desktop software.
Finally, when I actually uploaded pictures I'd People-tagged, the online versions knew nothing about the People tags, even though I had options set to preserve all tags. When I pointed this out to Microsoft staff, they informed me that it was a known bug that would be fixed before the product launches.
Privacy for People tags falls short of that for Picasa's Name tags: By default, when you upload photos to an online gallery, the People tags are included. Name tags are private by default. In other tagging news, you can add non-People tags to help find pictures on certain topics, but there's no equivalent to Picasa's geotagging, which places picture locations on a Google Map.—
Picture Sharing and Presentation
This version of Photo Gallery integrates better with the Live Photo's online galleries, which you reach with a simple click of the Publish button. And when you do publish, the other apps in the Live suite know it: The content appears in your network updates on your Home page and in your Messenger status. Photo Gallery also lets you upload directly to third-party sites like Flickr. In this respect, Windows Live Photo Gallery is more open than Google's Picasa, which uploads only to its own photo-hosting service. Still, Picasa goes further in integrating its local software with Web albums, actually letting you sync them automatically.
Photo Gallery's slideshows let you add Themes, such as Album, Fade, and Spin—more choices than Picasa offers. But iPhoto is the winner here, with 14 transition styles and background music options. Photo Gallery gives you the option of using Movie Maker to add a musical background and a cross-fade transition between frames, but the tool trails Picasa 3's Movie Maker. A Make menu option that takes you to Window's standard data-CD burning function doesn't give you the polished presentation of Picasa's gift CD option. You can, however, produce a menued DVD with images using Windows DVD Maker. Finally, an equivalent to Picasa's collage creator is missing.
Like the competitors, Photo Gallery lets you order prints from mail services like Shutterfly or pharmacy chains for local pickup. Surprisingly, the options for printing at home top those in iPhoto, which offers only full-page or small contact-sheet options. Again, though, Picasa is tops here, letting you also add text and shrink or crop images to fit output.
The Windows Live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) beta makes substantial improvements over its predecessor. It's got better editing tools, the ability to upload to third-party services, and the innovative new People tags. Microsoft's program is catching up with Picasa, which still has better face tagging and adds geotagging, to boot. Windows Live die-hards will be pleased to discover the improved integration with the other Live offerings. But if the beta is any guide, Microsoft's latest still isn't ready to dethrone Picasa.
More Photo Management & Sharing Reviews:
Final Thoughts
Windows Live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) beta
The Windows Live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) beta has improved editing tools, a unique people-tagging feature, and the ability to upload to Flickr and other services. But Photo Gallery still trails Picasa, which has better face tagging and integration with online galleries.