Windows Live Photo Gallery

» see photogallery.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

windows live photo gallery was microsoft's free desktop photo organizer. it shipped bundled with windows vista in november 2007 and was offered as a separate download for windows 7 and windows 8. it lived inside the windows live essentials suite alongside the mail client and movie maker. on january 10 2017 microsoft ended support for the essentials line and pulled the installer from its servers.

the product was a direct response to picasa. google had bought picasa in 2004 and made it free, and apple was shipping iphoto on every new mac. microsoft did the obvious thing and built its own. the feature set caught up by the 2011 release. you got face tagging that learned names from your messenger contact list, plus a panorama stitcher that turned overlapping shots into a single wide jpeg. a feature called photo fuse let you swap a face from one frame of a burst into the chosen base image. photo fuse looked like magic when it worked, which was most of the time on group shots taken seconds apart.

nothing replaced it cleanly. the windows 10 photos app shipped in 2015 with viewing and basic editing but dropped the face tagging and the metadata layer. people who had spent years tagging family albums in photo gallery were left with.xml metadata sidecars that no other tool reads. when picasa was killed in march 2016 and photo gallery followed in january 2017, the consumer desktop photo organizer category effectively ended within a year. the survivors of that user base moved to icloud photos or google photos in the cloud.

i was on picasa during this whole window. it had landed on every engineer's machine i knew between 2008 and 2014, partly because google had been pushing it for years and partly because the indexing was fast on the dual-core laptops of the era. windows live photo gallery existed in the same room and i never opened it. by the time microsoft pulled the download in 2017 i had already moved to phone photo libraries, which sync silently and keep all the metadata inside their own ecosystem.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the features that worked ~

the face tagger pulled names from windows live messenger and from your hotmail contacts. once you tagged a few faces it would propose names for new ones, with surprising accuracy on the well-lit shots. the panorama stitcher took a folder of overlapping images and produced a single wide jpeg with the seams blended. photo fuse was the burst-frame face-swap tool that nobody expected from a free download and that nobody at microsoft marketed correctly.

~ what killed it ~

the windows essentials retirement was the official cause. underneath that, microsoft had stopped investing in the desktop photo client category around 2012. the company was pushing onedrive's web-side photo features and the bundled photos app in windows 10. there was no announcement that photo gallery was being deprecated. updates simply stopped. the january 2017 essentials shutdown made the death formal.

~ the inheritance ~

the metadata sidecar files in user folders. modern photo apps do not parse the windows live photo gallery face tag xml. anyone who spent a winter break tagging five thousand family photos in 2010 has a database that does not move forward. the photo files themselves still open in any viewer. the labels and faces are stuck inside a.pictures folder format nothing else reads anymore.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »