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New Windows Live Photo Gallery Plugins

Written by Josh on Thursday, September 18th, 2008

Today after weeks of rumours and leaks the Windows Live Wave 3 beta was released for public download and testing.

There is so much to talk about but I’ll just stick to what’s relevant, the new Live Photo Gallery and also the final release of Live Writer. Writer has always supported extensions but now includes the fully updated API for plugins, so you can get started on those.

Windows Live Photo Gallery 3 has a lot of changes including a sleak new UI (although I think I prefer the blue theme from Wave 2), the ability to create Photosynths directly from the gallery and some new people-tagging features. What it doesn’t include is facial recognition which is a considerable let-down.

One of the best additions however is the brand new API which will enable developers to create their own extensions and plugins for sharing photos in more online services then just Live Space and Flickr.

Michael Palermiti, project manager of the Live Photo Gallery software posted this entry on the Windows Live Dev Blog:

As part of the new beta release we announced today we’re also announcing some new extensibility interfaces for Photo Gallery beta. One of the most requested features we’ve heard this past year from users (and developers!) is more support for sharing services.

Today, I’m pleased to announce a brand new, simple framework that enables developers to create photo and video publishing plug-ins. The framework defines a set of interfaces that facilitate communication between Photo Gallery and the plug-in. The plug-in developer has creative control of the user interface of the plug-in and handles the details of communication with the 3rd party service. Plug-ins are managed applications; .NET Framework 2.0 or greater is required for the plug-ins.

Once a plug-in is installed they will be accessible right on the Publish menu under More services.

We’re excited about what the community will come up with. You can get all the developer resources you’ll need over on new Photo Gallery web page on this site: http://dev.live.com/photogallery. On our team blog we’ll be blogging a lot more about this and all the slick new features in the beta.

Also incidentally, I’ve been finding Live Photo Gallery to be a lot faster and more responsive then the Wave 2 offering, and that’s definitely a good thing =)