My sister purchased a DSLR about a year ago. The pictures on her blog continue to get better and better! Everywhere I go with other bloggers the DSLR’s come flying out and photos start a snappin. It’s kinda sad when the best pictures I’ve taken recently have been from my Palm Pre (included in this post). It seems every where I go, people are taking pictures. Typically taking much better pictures than I am.
Even though my photos are generally horrible, I can do a little something about them with Windows Live Photo Gallery. This is a free download from www.live.com. Editing pictures becomes so much easier in a program like this as opposed to Photoshop, which is what I typically have used.
In Photo Gallery you can see all of your pictures sorted by date taken. You can easily jump from year to year and view only the pictures from that year, or month or even do a text search (if you are into renaming your images). As you start tagging your images, which is very easy to do with Photo Gallery, you can also search by certain tags too. Tags are a way of categorizing different images, posts and other items. If I tag an image with “birthday” I can quickly find all of the images in my pictures folder that are of birthdays (no matter whose birthday the picture is of).
Not only is it easy to find exactly the image you are looking for, you can make it look it’s best within the program too. There are several editing options to choose from including color, red eye, and even retouching to make sure that zit that cropped up right before your child’s birthday is erased from memory.
The last of my favorite features is the ability to “create”. You can upload photos to facebook or flickr, or videos to YouTube directly from the program. You can even order prints or link images together to create a panoramic view.
Don’t take my word for it, check it out today… oh and maybe ship me a camera sometime in the near future.
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I’d like a DSLR eventually to but for now my Canon G10 still takes great pictures, just not very fast, anyway a true artist can make due with less as proven with the shot above :-D, I’ve taken some decent shots with my phone to.
One thing I really like about Windows Live Gallery is the fact that it supports XMP meta data, an open standard developed by Adobe, I remember the uploading feature was originally included in Windows Gallery for Vista. I think it’s a shame that MS has to have users download cool and useful programs while other companies get to include what ever programs and services they want on their system when MS are the ones who’ve always been pretty open about letting people develop what every they want on their systems.
I have a DSLR and I know how to use about 10% of what it can actually do. I now have hundreds of “potentially great” photos on my laptop which I should eventually do something with! I think I’ll go check out Windows Live Photo Gallery.
You and me both girl! HATING my point and shoot still. Need a DSLR badly, but with the buying of the house no $ for new toys 🙁 Maybe next year in San Diego we will be rockin some fab cams for our late night adventures! Then, of course, we will be using Windows Live Photo Gallery as opposed to the FB mess.
Check out the older Konica Minolta Dimage Z10. You can get a lens for a better zoom. It’s an older camera, a point and shoot (with lots of features) and only 3mp. BUT, I’ve gotten more comments about the photos I took with it then I have my newer, entry level DSLR (not that I’ll ever admit that to anyone else). 😉
After researching and deciding to give it a try, I discovered it doesn’t work with XP. Yep, I’m still in the stone ages using XP. *sigh