Windows Live Photo Gallery Publishing Wizard

Hi guys,

I thought I'd pop along here and "state my intentions" as it were, to create a publishing plugin for the new "Wave 3" release of Windows Live Photo Gallery (an actual plugin, rather than "order prints").

I started using Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG from hereon in!) not long after upgrading to Vista and find it an excellent and lightweight way to manage photos. The latest version adds to the powerful keyword tagging feature, the ability to add Facebook style people tags with marquees around the people's faces. I'm also really very much a fan of embedding this data in the file itself, as XMP. This means that the data will always travel with the file and it is much less likely to be "lost" as might be the case were it stored simply in a database.

For a while I've been dreaming about being able to synchronize photos between my local PC and my Gallery2 installation. My vision is that Gallery2 will become simply a way to exhibit my photos, rather than a place to organise, tag, title etc. and that this information will be pulled from the local files.

The publishing wizard is fine, but it has no support for syncronization, duplicate detection etc. and it certainly does not transfer the richer metadata such as face tagging etc. It was never really designed to send photos to an online gallery, but instead to a photo printer where the concept of duplicates has little relevance.

With the release of the "Wave 3" Windows Live Suite, Microsoft have made an SDK available (I believe, though I may be wrong, that this is the first version in which this is the case).

Therefore, it is my intention, should no-one else be attempting this at present, to create a PublishPlugin for WLPG which uses the Gallery2 API to perform the following actions:
- syncronization of selected photographs to a Gallery2 installation with duplicate detection and prevention.
- transfer of metadata into Gallery2, updating of existing metadata where appropriate.
- transfer of face tags and bounding boxes.

I am wondering whether the sensible thing to do might be to write two plugins here, one which will syncronize photographs (and is a publish wizard for WLPG). The other would be a Gallery2 plugin which could extract XMP metadata. As far as I know, no-one has yet done this? I guess it would be in the realm of the Exif plugin guys if there are any of them around these days? Anyone fancy taking on the Gallery2 XMP side of the challenge?

I actually have a very very very ugly XMP plugin on my own Gallery2 installation. It extracts the title and tags from a file with XMP data in it and saves them in the database. It does it using a string search through the start of the file, it's horrible, but it works! Naturally I'd be looking for a more structured way to do this in an official plugin!

Anyway, I'm going to leave it there for now but I will report back as I progress further with this. If anyone has any thoughts or ideas then feel free to drop a note here!

Cheers,

Mark.

I use Gallery Remote to upload photos, but I have had trouble with it for a long time now (it is something to do with resizing pictures, I get errors sometimes, but not consistently enough to figure it out yet).

Anyway, I have recently discovered WLPG (found it as a solution to auto-rotating images as I import them from the camera/card) and the first thing I thought when I saw the publish button was..."Wow, I wonder if anyone has made a plugin for Gallery yet?"

I haven't started using tags yet, but I'm sure I will at some point. I am very interested in your idea to make a publishing plugin for WLPG. However, I already have all my photos on my computer, so I don't necessarily need something to "synchronize" them, but more of a one-way publishing of them to the gallery. Can you make that an option in your plugin (one-way upload to gallery only vs full sync)?

Thanks for taking my first feature request! Let me know when you have a working plugin, I'll be happy to test it for you!

My Gallery

count me in. this to me is such a critical feature for gallery/WLPG.

since i switched to vista about 2 years ago, i've found the windows photo gallery (and the updated windows live photo gallery) to be the quickest and easiest way to organise/find pictures on my local PC. i totally dumped the software that came with each of my camera's and just copy the memory cards into a dated directory which gets picked up by WLPG.

i've played with the (default) flickr plugin and it works a treat.

to have such functionality with gallery would just be so awesome.

your timing is (potentially) good as well. i'm in the process of building a new server to put into my CoLo rack, so a brand new install of everything is in order!

i look forward to seeing your work.

best of luck!

cheers, Wiz!!

I've started a project on CodePlex for this: http://www.codeplex.com/liveuploadgallery2

I've already written some code (stubs mostly, but its a start!). You'll need Visual Studio 2008 (Professional or C# Express: http://www.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/). Also, I'm using the subversion bridge, so AnkSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) is nice to have (if you have the Professional or above SKU, as I don't think this works in the Express SKUs).

Of course, you'll also need Windows Live Photo Gallery installed (since the Microsoft.WindowsLive.PublishingPlugin.dll is referenced from this install).

If you're interested in contributing, sign up for an account on CodePlex and shoot me a pm or an email.

I would really like to see this plugin developed. Its nice having the Facebook plugin for WLPG.

Due to copyright concerns, I had to rename the project to Publish on Gallery. The URL stays the same http://winlive2gallery.sourceforge.net