Microsoft gets a better answer to Flickr

Dashken · 5th Dec 2008, 04:52 PM

Quote:

Microsoft's improved photo-hosting site offers slide shows, but images don't fill the screen.

For a company that's trying to take on the online might of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has had a decidedly inferior photo-sharing site. Now that's changing, though.

As part of an overhaul of its online properties, the company announced a number of improvements to its Windows Live Photos site.

Among the new features:

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• 25GB of storage space and no more 500-shots-per-month limit on uploads.
• A what's new feed to show what photos your contacts are adding, part of the social side of Windows Live.
• A new slide show view.
• Better permissions for controlling how photos are shared.
I found the new site workable but still imperfect.

The photos.live.com site bears a strong resemblance to Yahoo's Flickr.

The most glaring ugliness to me was that the slide show is limited to small versions of the images. That's no problem on an 800x600-pixel screen, but even Flickr, which still hasn't figured out how to dynamically scale images on its regular photo pages, has full-screen slide shows.

Another hitch was that it's apparently impossible to rename your photos. So pick a file name you like before you upload. And you can't change the order of photos shown unless you want to diddle with the photos' "date taken" metadata, which sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.

As a fan of keyboard controls, though, I do like the fact that I can use the arrow keys to cycle through photos in an album, though it works only intermittently.

Source: Microsoft gets a better answer to Flickr | Underexposed - CNET News