Microsoft betas photo gallery and web storage

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 28 June 2007 02:33

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft has begun a managed beta test of a pair of new Live services: an online photo gallery and web-based file storage.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is described as an upgrade to Vista's Windows Photo Gallery. To be offered free of charge to Vista and XP SP2 users, Live Photo Gallery allows the sharing, editing, organising and printing of photos and digital home videos.

"We’re really proud of this service because it's so easy to share photos – it's really as easy as sending an e-mail. You can also easily publish your photos to your Windows Live Spaces," said Chris Jones, corporate vice president, Windows Live experience program management at Microsoft.

Windows Live Folders provides 500M of online storage that can be used as a way of accessing the same files from multiple computers, as a way of sharing files among a restricted circle, or to make documents publicly available.

500M is on the small side, even for a free service. AOL's Xdrive service already provides 5G of storage at no charge. But Live Folders is only a beta, and there's nothing stopping Microsoft from increasing the quota if feedback from testers suggests that is appropriate.

"[S]oon we'll begin to offer a single installer which will give customers the option of an all-in-one download for the full Windows Live suite of services instead of the separate installation experience you see today," said Jones. Apart from the convenience factor, that will also provide better visibility of the various services.

"Looking ahead five years we believe every piece of software could come with a service and that customers will come to expect that," he added

Microsoft is already running beta tests of a variety of Live services including email, instant messaging, search and collaboration.