Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8

Among the exciting new features is “SkyDrive on the desktop”, an app that makes SkyDrive visible in Windows Explorer. The illustration here is from the blog post.

The SkyDrive app is aimed at Windows 8 but will also run on Windows 7.

Here is a Youtube video describing the features.

New SkyDrive features

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Windows Live SkyDrive has seen a lot of improvements in the past year and more are coming. Window 8 will reportedly be extensively integrated with SkyDrive and take advantage of the service “natively”. So the next SkyDrive update should come around the time of the release of the “Windows 8 Consumer Preview”, that is expected at the end of February (2012).

A number of new features have been reported on several blogs, the most recent being a post on  liveside.net “More upcoming SkyDrive features revealed: ODF documents, BitLocker key management, URL shortening, and much more”.

The rumored features include:

• Support for additional document formats.
• Short URLs for sharing of files and folders – a much needed feature.
• Replacement or integration of Live Mesh to provide access and sharing of all items on SkyDrive.
• A “Windows Explorer” style application running online in the browser.

Stay tuned for more!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

The mini slide shows on folder tiles are captivating all by themselves. This makes organizing and showing photos easy and pleasant.

What SkyDrive does not have is an easy way to present your photo galleries publicly with a short address that can be easily shared. True, SkyDrive offers very granular sharing so specific photos or folders can be shared only with the individuals you wish, but for photos that you would like to share publicly a “grand entrance” is missing at the present time. 

My solution has been to use a photo blog as that “grand entrance”.

• A blog has a relatively short, easy to remember, web address.
• A blog can be nicely arranged with pages and links.
• The posts can be used to present one or more photos on a topic, as illustrated here with my photo blog, “Gallery Ludwig”.
• Posts, “the update notifications”, can be set to also automatically send a note to social networks. My WordPress blog sends a Twitter tweet and posts a message on Facebook.
• Blogs posts are very easily prepared with the use of Windows Live Writer. For tips see Live Writer Basics.
• Links are readily inserted to SkyDrive photos or folders.

Here is how the automatically generated tweet looks on a Twitter page. What could be nicer?

Not only does the tweet list the post title and provide a link to the post, the expanded view shows one of the photos and lists the first part of the post text.

The message on Facebook is similar.

So by just posting to your blog, you can get the word out to your friends where they are most likely to see it.

As they say on late night TV: But wait, there is more!

A blog post can include a nice collage link to a SkyDrive album. Live Writer can do this for top-level albums only, but there are tricks for doing that for subfolders too.

POW-ART VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

And there is still more. When you have a panorama it invariable will be skinny. The full size image can be stored on SkyDrive, but it will not look very impressive when viewed in its folder or slide show. But in a blog post such a skinny image can be linked to a “Zoom.It” version like here:

Well, did I make my case for using a blog as a “grand entrance” to SkyDrive photos?

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Here is the procedure

There are two steps to getting an URL that will work publicly. First make sure that the photo, or the folder, is shared with “Everyone”. For details see Sharing in the new SkyDrive.

The second part is then easy. Bring up the photo in SkyDrive. In the information pane on the right, click View original. This will load the original, full-size photo into your browser. Get the web address, the URL of the original, full-size photo, from the browser address bar. Copy it with Ctrl+C.

You can the paste the address to where you need it (with Ctrl+V).

Note that the address is is complex and long. Typically more that 150 characters in length. For the photo illustrated here, the URL is 161 characters long:

In the sharing dialog, SkyDrive offers links. Those links, however, are to the SkyDrive page, not the photo itself. That link is fine for sharing the photo along with its folder. If the photo is shared publicly but the folder is not shared, it will look to the visitor as if there is just that one photo in the folder. The visitor will have access to other publicly shared photos and documents, so be careful!

You might think that there is another way to get an URL, that is by right-clicking the photo as shown on its SkyDrive page. This will no longer provide the normal options that you get with an image in a browser. In the new SkyDrive, the right-click provides SkyDrive related options. To a visitor this will be like the illustration here, just offering a Download and View original option. (When logged in to your SkyDrive, you get more options).

The actual URL, obtained as described here, can be used in a variety of ways, but is very hard to communicate in text form. It is best used as a hyperlink. The illustration above of the URL is actually an image with the same hyperlink attached so you can see how it works.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

You can right-click any folder or other item (temporarily, new item) and get a drop-down menu that includes a “Move to” option.

But wait, there is more! In Details view it is now possible to select more than one item. There are check boxes in front of all list items. Items can be selected or un-selected with a click in this box. A right-click then also produced a “Move to” option in the menu.

For a single selected item, the right pane shows the various options as in the past, with the Move to option as well.

The move menu is an overlay with navigation options as we all are used to from Windows Explorer. The file structure on SkyDrive can be navigated in the normal way. There is also an option to add a new folder in any location in the file structure.

This all works in the normal, customary way. The items are moved to the new location in short order.

But wait, there is still more!

Any permissions that had been assigned to the moved items are retained in the new location. The items also inherit the permission settings from the new location. The sharing settings are listed in the information pane for a selected item and show the permission hierarchy.

Permission, “sharing”, settings can be removed only at the level where they were assigned. Additional sharing can be done item by item, be it folder, photo, or document.

But wait, there is still more! If you had distributed links to items or folders, these links still work as before (unless you change sharing settings). This is great!

Your friends will just find the item as before. They can see the new location from “Folder view”. Visitors can navigate  through the file tree if they have sharing permission.

Items in unshared folders can be shared, even set to “Everyone”, public. This can lead to interesting and confusing navigation. If a visitor clicks on a folder that is not shared, a sign-in page comes up or an error message. Generally, any visitor can see all public items from the “SkyDrive”, root location, even public items that are located in unshared folders. That is perplexing at first encounter.

There are bound to be additional changes to the way sharing now works, it is rather confusing and overly complicated. But for now, many prior limitations have been lifted and that is welcome. Keeping the prior permissions and links is a great accomplishment. There must have been a lot of hard work done up there in the cloud by Microsoft folks. Thanks!!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 30,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The recent changes to SkyDrive now allow sharing of individual items, not just folders or albums. A couple of posts in the Windows Live blog provide detailed information on how the sharing of SkyDrive files and folders is implemented.  The two posts describe the problems in moving from the previous method to the current model and the details of how sharing now works.

Designing app-centric sharing for SkyDrive, part 1 of 2: Complexity of “simple”

Designing app-centric sharing for SkyDrive, part 2 of 2: Rebuilding permissions

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Now any item can additionally be shared individually. Photos and files still inherit the share settings from containing folders. Folders and albums pass their share settings to items inside.

Sharing has a new dialog with the recipients email address as the primary feature. A pretty email informing the recipients is automatically generated and sent.

Action items for a folder are mostly located in the information pane at the right. When “Share” or “Share folder” is clicked a new dialog comes up looking about like this:

The default selection is “Send email” and provides an address box – it links to your contacts so typing a few letters brings up the relevant part of your list. There is a place for a message. There are two sharing options, “Recipient can edit” and “Recipient must sign in to view” making sharing a bit complicated. Other sharing options are posting to Facebook or other services and “Get a link”.

There are three options in the “Get a link” portion of the dialog as shown in the illustration. They are “View only”, “View and edit”, and “Make it public!”. This last option corresponds to what was called “Everyone” in the past.

When a “Get a link” button is pressed the corresponding sharing setting is added to the sharing list and an URL is provided.

All these options add up to a rather complex sharing list, what with inheritances from containing folders on up the chain. Here is one example of the sharing information. It list the individuals that received share emails  and the share settings from all containing folders.

Many folks have already complained about the complexity to Microsoft, so this sharing method is bound to undergo some more changes.

Note the last item in the sharing list illustration, “Friends can view”. This is a setting that the new scheme has inherited from the prior sharing system.

Remember the permissions page with the slider? The settings that were made there still apply, but in the new scheme you cannot select sharing with “Friends”. You must list them individually in the email option. Actually there is another option: You can share with the groups or categories that you have set up in your contacts folder. Just type the category designation in the email address field and they will all receive the invitation email.

SkyDrive is undergoing a lot of changes and more are bound to come. Windows 8 will use SkyDrive “natively”, whatever that means, and all users will have their own SkyDrive. Many folks have asked that Live Mesh be combined with SkyDrive. I am sure there are people at Microsoft trying hard to figure out how to do this and still maintain backward compatibility with the files and folders and sharing, not to mention previously set up URLs for files and folders. So, stand by for changes!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Images will be scaled to fit the browser window, of course, but when the window is larger than the original photo you would expect to see it reproduced in its full resolution and quality. When the original image is smaller than the window, it is shown in its original size in most photo sharing slide shows, so there is an expectation that it will look just as good as the photo before it was uploaded. This is not the case for most services.

I undertook an experiment: I uploaded a test image to several services and compared the reproduction quality. The services were Flickr, Picasaweb, SkyDrive, and Shutterfly. The test image was an “abstract” with uniform areas that show JPG artifacts very readily.  You can see the image here, click on it to see the original as stored on SkyDrive.

So what were the results?

Below are enlarged clips from the same part of the image (upper left). The leftmost image is the original, there is a flat colored area with a one-pixel border on another flat area. The next one shows how this area appears in a Flickr slide show, there are some hardly-noticeable artifacts. The third image is from Picasaweb, the image shows no detectable deterioration. This is followed by a clip from a SkyDrive slide show. The artifacts here are about as they are in an 80% quality JPG compressed image. The last clip is from Shutterfly. Shutterfly scales the image to the browser window, increasing the size beyond the original. This clip is from a window which showed the image in approximately the original size, but deterioration can be detected in smaller windows as well.

So there you have it. Picasaweb is best, followed by Flickr, SkyDrive, and Shutterfly.

Compressing the image to lower JPG quality makes the download time faster, you get a quicker, smoother show. This test image, in 100% quality JPG form, is 356 kB in size, the 80% quality JPG version takes up only 122 kB. So the lower quality image can be downloaded in just a third of the time – enough justification for the recompression.

For most of us, even the high-compression Shutterfly presentation is perfectly acceptable. Click here to see the Shutterfly slide show. However, discerning connoisseurs may wish to use Google Picasaweb until Microsoft decides “anything they can do, we can do too”.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

These changes should be live by the time you read this post.

Thank you, Omar!!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Geoff Coupe in his post The Pitfalls of Design sums up the major shortcomings. Another feature that was removed: SkyDrive no longer shows the tags that were assigned to photos before uploading. It even asks to “Add a tag”. Yet the tags are there. When you map a SkyDrive album in Windows Explorer, all the assigned metadata is shown just the same as for images on the local drive. (How can I see my SkyDrive photos in Windows Explorer?) Of course, the mapped SkyDrive album no longer functions as you would expect, it is worthless for organizing or uploading photos. The illustration here shows one of three mapped albums. They appear as drives or folders, you can step to subfolders and view the images and see the documents, but any useful functionality is absent.

With the stories about Windows 8 there have been some tantalizing comments of full-integration of SkyDrive. Omar Shahine, Group Program Manager, SkyDrive, in a recent post, SkyDrive – designing personal cloud storage for billions of people, presents a candid report on SkyDrive and the challenges of “cloud services”. LiveSide takes a skeptical view of this, SkyDrive blog post: setting the stage for a new version, or admitting failure?, however it is a very promising article. Even more promising are the commitments made in comments to Geoff’s post and elsewhere. There is every reason to expect that with Windows 8 SkyDrive will become the premier cloud service for the average user as well as the more technically demanding geeks.

So what can we expect?

Windows Live Mesh works like a charm on the connected devices – just a folder like any other, except that the folders on the devices are synchronized across the Internet – they do not need to be on at the same time. The files show up in SkyDrive but unfortunately they cannot be used like other files in SkyDrive. From the many comments about this, that will be, no doubt, be corrected.

The “Create” links, in SkyDrive and the jump list, create files in the root location which does not allow the file to be moved to a folder. Surely that can be expected to be corrected.

The details already mentioned above in Geoff’s blog will be corrected – see the comment on that post by Omar.

Another way that SkyDrive has already been moved closer to the desktop is “pinning”. Internet Explorer offers “pinning” of many websites. This works very nicely already for SkyDrive as well as Hotmail or the online Live site.

The technology and the potential has been there to make SkyDrive the premier cloud service, but maybe not the full understanding and appreciation of the public’s needs. But that has changed: Omar tweeted “Working on getting to 1st place” in response to a lifehacker post that shows SkyDrive running a distant third behind Dropbox (Most Popular Online File Storage and Syncing Service: Dropbox).

Also see LiveSide presents Questions and Requests, first off is SkyDrive – Get your requests passed on to Microsoft.

With Windows 8 just a couple of months away (beta release is widely expected in January 2012), can the new SkyDrive be far behind?

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Now a blog post by the Windows 8 team confirms that the installation, and particularly the upgrade procedure, has been drastically revised and improved over prior versions (Building Windows 8 – Improving the setup experience – Steven Sinofsky and Christa St. Pierre).

This article contains two pleasant surprises:

1. The hardware demands of Windows 8 have been scaled back such that many Windows XP computers will be able to run Windows 8.
2. Purchasing an upgrade online will allow the installation to be done in a simple download-and-install operation.

This is certainly good news for many users who are still using Windows XP. The not-so-good news is that, as with Windows 7, the upgrade does not allow migrating your applications. Here is a quote from the article:

“Here’s the list of what you can migrate based on your currently installed version of Windows:

Clean install is supported across all versions.”

At least your data will be retained, but you probably will need newer versions of your applications for Windows 8.

Information Week also has an article on this: Windows 8 On XP Machines? Microsoft Says Yes.

The simplified download and install procedure is described in the Windows 8 team blog. It will be one integrated operation, right from the web. My install time of the Developer Preview edition was surprisingly quick – minutes rather than hours. Installing Windows 8 from the web will, of course, depend on your connection speed. For many of us with modest “high-speed” access, the download time will dominate. But even a 2 Mb/s connection should get the job done in just over two hours.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Let me tell you a story to illustrate the vulnerability. A writer shared a link to a blog post with 23,000 followers on Twitter. The post contained photos with a “VIEW SLIDE SHOW” link to a SkyDrive photo album.

This is a popular and appealing way to share an album, I like to do that myself and many posts here at This ’n That contain such links. Unfortunately, SkyDrive “slide shows” have a link to the thumbnails view of the album. That circled up-arrow in the upper left corner allows anyone to see the album overview and with that a lot more. Right above the thumbnails is the path of the album with a link back to the profile page of the owner. Now the default setting in Windows Live is to show your friends on your profile page. The little icons there allow easy access to the friends’ profile pages. The friends’ profiles likely also show their friends.

Now back to my story. This particular writer also shows the friends’ icons on the profile page. I was able to step from friend to friend – around the country and around the world! I wound up in Brazil on the twentieth hop across the SkyDrive clouds. I did not encounter any with the friends list not showing.

Keep in mind, even if you do not show your friends list, some of your friends might. So someone viewing the profile of a friend can get back to your profile. If you set your privacy setting to “Limited” – you will still be exposing your friends list as shown in the illustration here.

Yes, only your items – albums, folders – set to public can be seen by strangers. But my point is, all you items set to public can be seen, and found by strangers. Don’t expect that your public photos and files will be hidden from prying eyes. Beware!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

This parade performance is probably best explained with a demonstration. With a group of overlapping photos Live Gallery can build a panoramic view of the scene, and it does a good job of it. With Image Composite Editor and Photosynth installed on your computer more options are available.

In Live Gallery on the Create tab in the Tools group there is a More Tools … command. With Microsoft Photosynth and Microsoft Image Composite Editor installed, these show in the menu. (You can find download links on the Resources page.)

Select pictures to combine into a panorama and then click Create a Photosynth in Create – More Tools … . The Photosynth app is launched and will create the classic Photosynth of overlapping images. Click Create Image Composite … instead, and the Image Composite Editor, “ICE”, is launched. Here you have a much wider range of tools for setting up the panorama.

ICE has a Publish to Web … button which exports the assembled image to Photosynth. There are a couple of requirements for this to work: Select Rotating Motion only and do not crop the resulting image.

The two illustrations here link to a classic Photosynth (left) and a panorama first generated with ICE (right).

A ICE panorama in Photosynth looks more real as you pan around in it than just a plain, flat image that you get from the panorama tool in Live Photo Gallery. That is especially noticeable in this vertical pan (click on image to view):

There is even more! Below the “fold” on the Photosynth site – you need to scroll down to see it – there is more information and links to other images and for some images there is a little map with a “push pin” in it. When you click this pin Bing Maps comes up, it may take a bit of time for all the information to load.

The map will be covered with pins showing little camera symbols indicating available Photosynth images. In the center will be a small icon image representing the picture being viewed. When that image is clicked a larger one comes up with an interesting option. Actually two options, “dive in” and “(quick)”. It is the dive in option that is really nice. Click it and Bing Maps “flies in” from space, angles in as it gets close and orients the view just the way it is in the panorama. Finally it winds up showing the panorama image.

Now, of course, to get that to work, you have to load some information on your Photosynth site. But it works amazingly well. As you finish adding information you can select Location and show where the pan was taken and even specify the angle. Photosynth and Bing Maps take car of the rest. Very slick! You have to see it – the illustrations here give you the idea, and then you have to try it yourself.

Signing up for a Photosynth account is free and you get 20 GB of free online storage. That is good for a lot of ‘synths even though each takes up quite a bit of space. You’ll enjoy creating your site, and your friends will be amazed!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

As you drag the favicon it gets bigger, when you get over the desktop (outside the browser) it offers to “Create link in Desktop” – you can do that, of course, but continue to drag it down to you taskbar. There it will say “Pin to Taskbar”.

Just let go of the mouse button and Café Ludwig is pinned to your taskbar.

Yes, you noticed correctly the different looking Windows Start button. The illustration comes from Windows 8 – that is another story – it works this way just fine in Windows 7.

There is more to the story. When you right-click the pinned icon a jump list comes up. It offers several options. For Café Ludwig the options are to three blogs: This ‘n That, Ask Ludwig and News and Notes.

Many sites are “pinable” – pardon my English – and for some sites the jump lists have a variety of offerings. For example for WordPress blogs, such as  Ask Ludwig or This ‘n That, the jump list shows links to recent posts (the list is updated when you visit the site).

Pinning sites that you frequently visit, especially your Windows Live SkyDrive or your Hotmail page, can make your computer even more convenient and easy to use. Enjoy!

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

The download page is at get.adobe.com/flashplayer Note that both 64-bit and 32-bit support are provided in one download.

Adobe still pushes junkware along with the Flash player, so be sure to uncheck the download option for Google Chrome or McAfee Security Scan or whatever you might see when you get to the download page.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/at-last-64-bit-abobe-flash-player/feed/ 1 ludwigkeck image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/remembering-steve-jobs/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/remembering-steve-jobs/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:47:17 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/remembering-steve-jobs/ Continue reading →]]> We were witness to genius. We are all saddened at the passing of Steve Jobs. He changed the way we listen to music, the way we communicate with friends, the way we experience the world. He set the standard of excellence for digital electronics and his designs will continue to influence and enhance product development throughout industry. Thank you, Steve Jobs. You took the high road. Your creations brought joy. Your vision will continue to enrich our lives.

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The current version of SkyDrive has disabled getting the URL, web address, of an image file. SkyDrive offers “Embed” code but that only gets back to the SkyDrive view of the photo. Besides, that code will not work in some uses like WordPress.com blogs (WordPress strips “iframe” code for security reasons).

Finding the URL in the right-click menu (in Internet Explorer one level further down in Properties) provides a web address to a reduced size version of the image, not the full size, stored image. Yes, SkyDrive lists the full size in the information pane. My SkyDrive illustration here shows that it lists the real 8605 x 3603 pixels size for this image, but the properties-URL is to a 1600 pixel version of this photo.

Fortunately, there is a Download provision which allows download of the original, full-size image. It is a bit complicated, but that is the route to the image URL. [No easier way has come to light – I hope Microsoft will re-enable obtaining the actual image URL soon.]

Finding the URL of a Photo in the new SkyDrive

Go to the image in SkyDrive using Internet Explorer (I use IE9). If the information pane on the right is not shown, click the little “<” (Expand) in the upper right.

Under the thumbnail of the image there is a Download link (the Rename and Delete links are present only if you are logged in).

Download the photo. Answer the question “Do you want to open or save …” by clicking Save. This will download the image to your default download folder.

Bear with me, we are after the URL not the file, but for now this is the “easy” way. The full size image will be downloaded. The downloader needs the address, URL, to the full image, and this is how we can get to it.

In the download bar at the bottom of the window click View Downloads.

If you did not pay attention and closed the bar, click Tools – the little wheel in the upper right – and then click View downloads in the drop-down menu. The illustration here uses the red pointer to show the Tools icon location.

The View Downloads – Windows Internet Explorer window shows your downloads (here I had previously cleared the list). Right-click on the file you just downloaded (this also works during the download). Click on Copy download link. Hurray! You got it! Now, what could be easier? The URL is now in your clipboard. I normally paste it into Notepad and save it for future use. You can, of course, delete the downloaded image from your download folder, it is just taking up space.

Use the URL to link to the image in your blog or website.

NOTE: This is a partial repost of an earlier article to allow easier searching.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/getting-the-real-url-of-a-photo-on-skydrive/feed/ 3 ludwigkeck http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/sharing-photos-with-a-live-group/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/sharing-photos-with-a-live-group/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:13:13 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/sharing-photos-with-a-live-group/ Continue reading →]]> Windows Live offers many features and they are well integrated with each other. Sharing photos with a Windows Live Group illustrates the ease and charm of Windows Live.

In Windows Live Photo Gallery one of the icons in the Share group is “Windows Live Groups”. If you are a member of a Live group, you can upload to the group’s site right from Photo Gallery. You must, of course, be a member and the group rules must allow members to add photos.

Sharing with the group is a snap. Just select the photos you wish to upload to the group site and click the “Windows Live Groups” icon in the Share group. If you belong to more than one group a dialog allows you to select the group.

Next you will see the available albums on the group site.

Click the appropriate album.

As with other uploads, there is an option to specify the maximum image dimension. The default is 1600px. If your photo images are larger in one dimension that this setting, they will be scaled down. There is also an option to upload the photos in their original size.

Click Publish and the photos are uploaded to the SkyDrive of the group.

You can inform your fellow group members with an email to the group address, or you can just wait for Live Messenger to show your photos on the other members computers.

Live Messenger not only provides the news of additions to group albums, it shows thumbnail slide shows and provides links to the photos. Here is an illustration, a partial clip from Live Messenger. Of course, here in the blog post the little slide shows can’t be reproduced.

Clicking a thumbnail in Live Messenger opens a photo viewer that is much nicer than the view you get on SkyDrive. You can resize the window, even show the photos full screen. There is a play button so you can let the slide show run on its own. You can also log in to the album on the group SkyDrive with a “View on SkyDrive” link.

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© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/sharing-photos-with-a-live-group/feed/ 0 ludwigkeck sharing-to-group-01 sharing-to-group-08 sharing-to-group-07 image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/setting-up-a-windows-live-group/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/setting-up-a-windows-live-group/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:48:40 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/setting-up-a-windows-live-group/ Continue reading →]]> Windows Live offers a wealth of tools and services. Live Groups have some great features to help members stay in touch and to exchange photos and documents. Live Groups are a great way for families, teams, clubs, or any kind of group, to stay connected.

Each group has its own group email address, it takes the form groupname@groups.live.com. Normally any group member can send an email to the group address and it reaches all the members. Non-members cannot spam the group – their message to the group address does not go through.

Sharing of photos and documents is another nice feature. Each group has a group website with its own SkyDrive.

Setting up the group

Setting up a Windows Live Group is very easy. Here is the procedure.

From your Windows Live Home page click Groups in the SkyDrive dropdown menu. See the illustration here.

Above the listing of your groups is a link “Create a group”. Click it to get started.

The screen clip here shows the “Create a group” page. The first step is to enter the name of the group. The second step is a bit harder, that is to select the group email address. Like any other email address, it has to be unique. It should be fairly short to make it easier for members to remember and to type. Like in setting up a regular email account there is a “Check availability” link. Once you have an acceptable name, you can finish by listing the initial members. You can add email addresses in the “Add people” field. There is also an option to add names from your contact list.

Click Create and your group will be set up and emails will go out to the people you listed in the “Add people” filed. You are now the “owner” of the group. The group now has a website. It can be found at groups.live.com/groupname.

There are a number of options to set features of the group.

You can upload a logo or group theme picture, or select one of the ones offered on the options page. There is a field for a group slogan and a short description.

You specify how new members can join. Either by invitation form you, the owner, or they can request to join on the group website. You can also specify if all members can add folders and albums or only the owners.

Members

Here is what a typical membership invitation email looks like:

The invitee can click View group and will be taken to the group website where there is a “Join” button (also a “Decline Invitation” button). Note: The invitee must have a Windows Live ID and sign in to see the “Join” button.

Email

The way email is handled is subject to settings on the group option page for email.

See the illustration here. By default the option for all members to be able to send group emails is enabled.

There is another option there “Anyone can view the group …” with a link provided in each email. That is a useful feature as it provides a quick link to the group site. There is a downside: Anyone with that link can visit the group site. If your group site contains information – like member personal information, personal photos, etc. that should be more tightly protected, select the option that only signed-in group members can see the site.

There is much more to Live Groups. Sharing of photos is particularly important to many groups and that is the subject of my next post.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/setting-up-a-windows-live-group/feed/ 0 ludwigkeck LiveGroup-01 LiveGroup-02 LiveGroup-05 image image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/sharing-photos-with-skydrive-albums/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/sharing-photos-with-skydrive-albums/#comments Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:54:25 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/sharing-photos-with-skydrive-albums/ Continue reading →]]> Sharing photos by using Windows Live SkyDrive albums is a many-splendored thing. SkyDrive serves many purposes and there are many ways of creating and sharing albums. How you start and the order of your procedure results in different outcomes. This can be confusing and interesting, useful and aggravating.

A SkyDrive album can be created at least three different ways. These methods also define how such an album is shared. Several sharing approaches are available. What the recipient sees can vary and even be different from one person to another. That is the magic of SkyDrive, a rapidly evolving “cloud” service, much promoted by Microsoft, scarcely explained, and little understood.

Creating a SkyDrive album

1. A SkyDrive photo album can be created when signed in online to Windows Live.
2. Windows Live Photo Gallery offers two ways to initiate a SkyDrive photo album. One method is to share to SkyDrive the other by Photo email (see the white and red arrows in the illustration).
3. Live Mail can be used to initiate an album. This is really also the second method listed for Live Photo Gallery.
4. You can produce a new album in the online Hotmail “new message” page.

OK, so I have already listed four ways of doing it. Each one of these leads to different results in some way.

Sharing an album

Two of the methods for creating an album, Photo email, Live Mail, and online Hotmail, imply sharing in the way the album is created. Yes, I listed three here, Photo email and Live Mail are really the same. When you select thumbnails in Live Photo Gallery and click Photo email, Live Mail is loaded (if it is your default email client) and the photos are already preloaded. Of course, you can use Live Mail manually. There are some nice features in this method that I will skip in this article.

When you create an album as part of starting an email, of course, you will be sharing it with the recipients. That takes care of creating the album and sharing  it. An email goes to each of the recipients advising them that you shared an album.

The other method is to share an existing the album from the SkyDrive album page. There are several option there for doing this. You can send a link  – again there are several of ways of doing this, two ways to generate an email with the link, you can get the album web address and paste it manually into an email.

SkyDrive albums can also be set to share with “friends”. This method will also automatically inform your friends provided they use and pay attention to Live Messenger.

Let’s look at the options in SkyDrive.

Go to the album in your SkyDrive. Note the “Sharing” section in the information pane on the right. There are several links for sharing there.

Edit permissions

Setting permission for an album defines who you are sharing with. There are a lot of options there. First there is the “Who can access this” slider. The bottom, “Me”, setting is the most private. With this setting nobody is automatically informed via Messenger. The settings for “Some friends” and “Friends” have additional options to permit your friends to contribute to the album. Note the setting of either “Can view photos” or “Can add, edit details, and delete photos”. You can share an album with friends and their friends, or set it to “Everyone (public)”. Albums that I use to illustrate this blog are set to public so that you can get to them and see the photos.

In addition to the slider and the access options, you can add additional people, they do not have to be Windows Live friends. You enter their email address. After clicking the Save button there is an option to send those folks an email with a link to the album. You should inform your friends of such an  email as it may wind up in their spam or junk folder since it comes from an address other than yours.

The illustration here shows how such an email looks. The email contains several links. Your logo and name links to your Windows Live profile page. The thumbnail and “View album” links go to the SkyDrive album.

Send a link

Another way to share a SkyDrive album is with the “Send a link” option. This sends an email just like the “Add additional people” option in “Edit permissions”. The recipient is added to the list and is shown on the permission page.

Get a link

The “Get a link” option opens a page with the URL in a text box. If the album is public only one URL is shown. Click Copy to copy the URL to your clipboard. You may have to give permission to allow access to your clipboard. The web address is rather long, don’t try to type it out, just paste it into an email from the clipboard.

If the album permission is not set to “Everyone (public)”, the “Get a link” page shows two URLs.

One URL is for sharing with Windows Live friends. They will need to sign in to their Windows Live account to get to your album with this link.

The other URL is marked “Share with everyone”. The note says: “Anyone can use this link to view the item without signing in to Windows Live”. You can send this to someone who is not a Windows Live friends. This even works for albums with the permission set to “Me”, that is, to you only! So be careful with this option!

There are a couple more sharing options shown farther down in this article. Options that allows sharing in a blog post or on a website.

Viewing a shared SkyDrive album

For the email methods the recipient, of course, receives an email. One version of such an email looks like the illustration here. Each of the thumbnails is a link and there are a couple of links in the email.

The links show the album a couple of ways. The prettiest version opens a Live Photo Gallery window showing the clicked photo. There is a “start” button to run a self-changing slide show. You can display this full-screen. The only shortcoming is that the slide show does not repeat automatically.

This Live Photo Gallery slide show is also reached from Messenger. Your Windows Live friends will see a small slide show of your album in Live Messenger.

The alternate album link is to the SkyDrive album directly.

Most links to a SkyDrive album go right to SkyDrive, for some people signing in to their own Windows Live account is required depending on the album sharing permission setting.

The album can be seen just like you see it except that there may be fewer options in the information pane. Here are two views of the info pane. The left one is your view and those friends who have “edit” access, the right illustration shows what other visitors see.

It is not noted anywhere, but to display the photos full screen, just click the F11 key (click it again to return to normal view).

Some more ways to share

If you have a blog or a website you can share a SkyDrive album quite easily. Make the album public so your site visitors will not be blocked. In a blog post prepared with Windows Live Writer, you can have something like this:

Cafe Art VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

For a website you might include a photo with a link to your album like this:

The link, of course, is one you obtained with the “Get a link” option.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Windows Live SkyDrive is a work in progress with a lot of recent changes. SkyDrive has changed and evolved, and with that come some unusual and unexpected features. Every user with a Windows Live ID, has access to SkyDrive for storing and sharing of documents, photos, even creating and collaborating documents using Microsoft Web Apps. You can access your SkyDrive from many devices and places, and even the SkyDrive folders and documents of friends who share with you. It does get a little complicated. This article tries to shed some light on some of the more unusual aspects of SkyDrive.

To get to your SkyDrive sign in with your Windows Live ID at https://skydrive.live.com/. You can pin SkyDrive to your taskbar (just drag the little icon in front of the URL to your taskbar, see illustration at right). Click on the cloud symbol in the taskbar and a browser window with your SkyDrive opens. It looks almost like Windows Explorer. Don’t expect it to work that way!

When you first get to SkyDrive you see the main, or “root”, area. Here are the “top-level” folders and there may be documents. Folders may also be referred to as “albums” if they are used for storing photos.

Like on your computer, you can have folders inside folders to organize your material to your needs. Unlike on your computer, in SkyDrive folders are not all alike. The top-level, or primary folders are different in a number of ways.

Primary folders

Even the primary folders are not all equal. For most you can specify who they are shared with. In the illustration above you can see that some folders (see the “Shared with” column) are shared with “Everyone (public)”, “Friends”, “Just me”, and some other notations. Some folders were set up automatically when the account was created, some are created by other processes, notably Hotmail when sending a “photo email”. For some of these folders you cannot change the sharing setting. For folders you created you can edit the permission settings at any time. When you move the pointer over an entry a “Show information” icon appears on the right side. When clicked, this opens an information panel for the item.

The information panel presents various commands. The top group, right below the folder name, offers the organizational tasks like Rename, Delete, Download.

The Sharing group shows who the folder is shared with and Edit permissions command (not available for all folders) and other share options.

In the Information group a variety of properties are listed. The most unusual is the last one on the bottom, “Folder type”. There are several folder types.

The two most important are Documents and Photos. In the upper left area you can select which folder type to display (also in the drop-down menu below SkyDrive in the top menu bar).

Any folder or albums inside a top-level folder will inherit the sharing permissions of the top-level folder. Subfolders cannot have their sharing modified.

When uploading photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery, only top-level folders are made available as destination albums.

Top-level folders cannot be moved or copied into other folders.

Together, the just stated two sentences will cause you “pain and suffering” when you try to reorganize your material.

Files in the SkyDrive root area

The little icons above the contents listing allow you to use Web Apps to create Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents or a OneNote file. You can specify and edit the sharing settings of such documents. You cannot move or copy them to another folder. This will almost certainly cause you more “pain and suffering”.  My advise: Do not create documents in the root area of SkyDrive.

The pretty views

On your computer in Windows Explorer you can display the contents of a folder several ways, “Details”, “Small icons”, etc.  SkyDrive offers two views: Details view (as shown above), or Thumbnails view (see icons in upper right area). The thumbnails view is decidedly the prettier one but does not offer the information panel for items.

Folders containing documents are depicted with folder images. If a folder, any type, has one or more photos inside, these are shown as a constantly changing slide show in place of the folder image. The number of items inside a folder is also shown. Individual files show the type icon as illustrated here.

Album view

The contents of albums can be shown as a details listing or in thumbnail view. Again any sub-albums or sub-folders will show changing slide shows of photos inside.

The thumbnails of the photos in an album are shown in approximately the true aspect ratio of the image. Note the vertical image of the skyscraper and the wide panorama picture in the illustration above.

Sub-folders and sub-albums

Now the good news. sub-folders or sub-albums can be moved from their existing parent folder to any other. Note the Move command illustrated in the information pane inside an album on the right. The move will take with it all the contents including any sub-folders.

Folder and albums cannot be copied, but they can be downloaded as a compressed ZIP file. The “Download with Photo Gallery” option can download only images but allows selecting them individually.

Photos and documents inside sub-folders can be moved or copied – one at a time – to any other folder. Moving more than just a few would be more “pain and suffering” and it is probably easier to download the folder, then uploading the files to the destination folder.

And more

Some of the procedures for specific chores are described in these posts:

Photos and Albums in the New SkyDrive – uploading

Photos and Albums in the New SkyDrive – organizing

Photos and Albums in the new SkyDrive – sharing and downloading

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/skydrive-folders-albums-files-and-photos-making-a-little-bit-of-sense/feed/ 0 ludwigkeck image image image image image image image image image image image image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/a-windows-tale-of-woe-error-0x80004005/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/a-windows-tale-of-woe-error-0x80004005/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:15:15 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/a-windows-tale-of-woe-error-0x80004005/ Continue reading →]]> Until just a few days ago, prior to late July 2011, I had a nice routine for importing and managing photos from my camera. My procedure included setting several properties of the photo files in Windows Explorer. I described the process in Camera to Internet – organizing, enhancing, sharing photos -one approach–part 1. Microsoft has made many changes this spring and summer and my “part 2” kept getting revised. And then even “part 1” was made obsolete.

It started recently when I could no longer apply properties in Windows Explorer. Each time I tried I got an error message. “An unexpected error is keeping you from applying properties to the file. … Error 0×80004005: Unspecified error”

I tried my laptop, a six-year old machine but up-to-date and now running Windows 7 Ultimate, with no problem.

In the illustration here you can see the same image. Setting an author name, or other properties works as it always has. You just click on the parameter in the Windows Explorer Details pane, enter the new text, and click Save. Works as expected on the laptop.

Why the problem all of a sudden on my new desktop machine (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on a six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1100T)? I checked Microsoft Answers. Others report this problem, but no fix. A search on the Internet did not come up with a solution. Microsoft still has this page up: Change the properties for a file – no hint of the problem. Two system restores did not correct the problem.

Then came the hullabaloo about the new Microsoft codec: Photo Gallery now supports raw format   (get it here: Microsoft Camera Codec Pack ) – It made matters worse. But at least that was a hint to the problem. Take a look at what I saw:

The Windows Explorer Details pane now showed even fewer of the properties and allowed none to be changed. I uninstalled the new codec. The Details pane (pain might come closer to the proper spelling) now showed no properties at all, it shrank to this:

I reinstalled the Nikon codec and got back to my original problem.

So it may not be that my computer is broken, can it be that Microsoft broke Windows Explorer with updates and the new codec? Progress?

One amusing note in this dire story: In the past, with no codec installed for my Nikon RAW photos, Windows Live Photo Gallery took me right to the Nikon codec download page. Now it takes me to the new Microsoft codec.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/a-windows-tale-of-woe-error-0x80004005/feed/ 0 ludwigkeck PDemo-06 PDemo-01 PDemo-08 image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-new-skydrive-hobbles-making-zoom-it-images/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-new-skydrive-hobbles-making-zoom-it-images/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:07:38 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-new-skydrive-hobbles-making-zoom-it-images/ Continue reading →]]> The newly released version of SkyDrive (“Pretty Face”) has made it almost impossible to get the URL, web address, of an image file for use elsewhere like Microsoft Zoom.it. SkyDrive offers “Embed” code but that only gets back to the SkyDrive view of the photo. Besides, that code will not work in some uses like WordPress.com blogs (WordPress strips “iframe” code for security reasons).

Finding the URL in the right-click menu (in Internet Explorer one level further down in Properties) provides a web address to a reduced size version of the image, not what you want for use in the delightful Zoom.it utility. Yes, SkyDrive lists the full size in the information pane. My SkyDrive illustration here shows that it lists the real 8605 x 3603 pixels size for this image, but the properties-URL is to a 1600 pixel version of this photo.

Fortunately, there is a Download provision which allows download of the original, full-size image. It is a bit complicated, but that is the route to the image URL. [There may be an easier way, and – I hope – Microsoft may have corrected the oversight and restored the address link by the time you read this.]

Finding the URL of a file in the new SkyDrive

Go to the image in SkyDrive using Internet Explorer (I use IE9). If the information pane on the right is not shown, click the little “<” (Expand) in the upper right.

Under the thumbnail of the image there is a Download link (the Rename and Delete links are present only if you are logged in).

Download the photo. Answer the question “Do you want to open or save …” by clicking Save. This will download the image to your default download folder.

Bear with me, we are after the URL not the file, but for now this is the “easy” way. The full size image will be downloaded. The downloader needs the address, URL, to the full image, and this is how we can get to it.

In the download bar at the bottom of the window click View Downloads.

If you did not pay attention and closed the bar, click Tools – the little wheel in the upper right – and then click View downloads in the drop-down menu. The illustration here uses the red pointer to show the Tools icon location.

The View Downloads – Windows Internet Explorer window shows your downloads (here I had previously cleared the list). Right-click on the file you just downloaded (this works during the download). Click on Copy download link. Hurray! You got it! Now, what could be easier? The URL is now in your clipboard. I normally paste it into Notepad and save it for future use, although the procedure for getting anew is so simple … (pardon my sarcasm).

You can, of course, delete the downloaded image from your download folder, it is just taking up space.

Use the precious URL to create a Zoom.it image. Go to Zoom.it. On the bottom where it says “Create your own…” click and paste in the URL. The process may take some time, especially if your image is large (hey, if it were small you would not need Zoom.it). Where you pasted in the URL you will now see the address to you zoom.it image. Copy the address so you can use and share it.

The image I used in the illustration here is from a presentation on making image composites. I used it to illustrate stitching errors – enjoy finding them, just click on the image. Avoiding such errors is another story altogether.

[Revised to clarify procedure, 7 Jul 2011 Ludwig]

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-new-skydrive-hobbles-making-zoom-it-images/feed/ 6 ludwigkeck image image image image image image image image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-new-skydrive-bouquets-and-brickbats/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-new-skydrive-bouquets-and-brickbats/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:39:19 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-new-skydrive-bouquets-and-brickbats/ Continue reading →]]> The newest facelift to SkyDrive is up and operational. It brings some charming new looks and some nice new features. It gets top billing on the menu bar on the Live home page (replacing the former “Office”). The ads are gone and the space is more cleanly utilized. The announcement post, “Introducing SkyDrive for the modern web, built using HTML5” covers the details and the underlying technology.

Here, in one view, some of the new look and features.  Like many other sites, SkyDrive can be pinned to the taskbar. Right-clicking the SkyDrive logo provides a jump list to the full file listing (shown here in the background using the detail view), just the documents or just the photos (shown here in thumbnail view). What I cannot show is the neat way the thumbnails of albums, or folders, continuously show slideshows of the images contained in the album. Very pleasant. Great going!

When showing the contents of an album the thumbnails are now (mostly) full representations of the images in their actual aspect ratios.

Uploading files or photos is still just a matter of dragging the thumbnails from a local folder to the Add Photos page on SkyDrive. The size limit is now 100 MB – sufficient even for large panoramas. Surprisingly, on my first test the photo resizing was ignored. As you can see in the illustration below, the size was set to the default 1600 pixel max. Yet a 21 MB panorama (8605 x 3603) was uploaded without so much as a “should I?” in full size.

With this update, SkyDrive has been brought closer to being integrated into the “experience” of Windows. To stay in the cloud computing metaphor, in spite of the nice silver linings there are still many dark clouds on the horizon.

In the previous version, SkyDrive offered a nice self-running slide show feature, images had “surround light” in a color tone appropriate to each image. Two versions back the thumbnails were animated and could be moved from bottom to a side. With the new version Microsoft continues the slide to “simplification”. The background is a monotonous monotone, the thumbnails, although correctly proportioned, highlight the displayed image with just an underline.

The self-running slideshow feature is no more. Here is how Omar Shahine, Group Program Manager, SkyDrive, at Microsoft explained it (in a comment to the announcement post):

• … when we moved from the Silverlight slideshow to an HTML based one, we didn’t implement a play button. In doing our research we found that users preferred controlling playback themselves, and the value of hitting play and sitting back to watch wasn’t all that important relative to other features…

When viewing the thumbnails of the albums the screen is filled with beautiful, little running slideshows, but just one click later we no longer have access to that technology – “sitting back to watch wasn’t all that important”. Alas, “other features” is another step toward mediocrity.

Take the method of moving files or photos from one folder or album to another. On the desktop you just select them and drag them from where they are to where you want them.

In SkyDrive it is one file or photo at a time. For files you open the info panel with the (information) link. Most of the controls are grouped toward the top. The Move link is under Information below Path. For photos the move link is similarly located. If you don’t expand the Information group you wont see the Move link. I took me a while to comprehend that “moving” is obviously an information property.

The Move command then opens a page for selecting the destination folder. Not elegant.

Allow me to call your attention to that pretty SkyDrive right-click menu. It includes “Tasks” to allow you to open a new Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document using Web Apps. Unfortunately, any document so created will be saved in the root (common area) of SkyDrive and will not be able to be moved into another folder. There are no Move or Copy commands for documents in the main SkyDrive area. No way to reorganize these files, unless you download, delete, then upload to a folder. With many documents and a substantial number of folders, finding a particular file thus gets more time-consuming. Not elegant.

Bloggers like to include images, and, as you can see from this article, I am one of them. SkyDrive was my source for images for a number of years. Microsoft moved millions of bloggers from the dearly-departed Spaces to WordPress. So you would think supporting them would be considered good business. But getting the URL of a picture in SkyDrive always has been a chore and now even that has been compromised. (see Sourcing images from the new SkyDrive.)

The URLs of the images in the previous version allowed access to the full view in a clean browser window. Here is what I am talking about: Prior to June 20, 2011 you could get the URL that shows the full image without providing access to any other. Click the left, small image of the hawk to illustrate that feature. The right image hyperlink is the best I can do now. It uses the “embed” code provided in SkyDrive and links to the image as shown in SkyDrive along with the rest of the album (and more). Another elegant feature lost.

Update after initial post: In the blog post publish routine the “embed” code was stripped. The image here is as it appeared in Windows Live Writer but the details have been changed to make it work. Not elegant!

SkyDrive folders can be mapped into Windows Explorer but that does not work as you would expect. (How can I see my SkyDrive photos in Windows Explorer?) When you drag a file into a mapped folder, it seems to work momentarily, then an error message: “The file … is too large for the destination file system.”

This is the error message, regardless of file size, for any file other that an Office file type. Office files work ok. Folders work ok, but not their contents except Office files. Not elegant.

One nice feature retained from the earlier versions is the ability to re-arrange the order of photos in an album to allow for proper presentation order in a slide show. The Arrange page uses Silverlight (as does the upload page). I am frightened by the remark “…when we moved from … Silverlight…” as this might indicate the goal for coming changes. Compare the methods as illustrated here:

On the left is the method when Silverlight is not installed. You are asked to re-number the image order. On the right, with Silverlight, it is just a matter of dragging a thumbnail to the new position, the thumbnails nicely move apart to let the repositioned image in. Will this nice feature also be simplified away?

The mini slide shows of the albums look impressive and no doubt give a hint of how Windows 8 will look and work. The space is nicely utilized and this will work well on small screens like phones and tablets. This is very nice. Yet the changes, new technology of HTLM5 or not, look mostly cosmetic and are limited to appearance and there is no improvement to the SkyDrive functionality.

I tossed a number of bouquets – they are well deserved, but they are outnumbered by brickbats and I have one more: For the past two years of blogging my most frequently read posts have to do with moving folders (and their contents) to SkyDrive. This feature is the most desired and has been totally neglected. Yet there is hope.

Drag a folder with files to the “drop photos here…” box. It is placed, but below it it says “View error”. When that is clicked you get “SkyDrive can’t upload folders…”.

Why do I say there is hope? See this image: The message is “New! You can now upload folders”. It is not found in SkyDrive but in Google Docs. If Microsoft’s customers can’t get satisfaction, maybe the competitive incentive will get the job accomplished.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-new-skydrive-bouquets-and-brickbats/feed/ 11 ludwigkeck SkyDrive-02 image image image image image image image SkyDrive-13 image image image image http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/two-bit-problems-in-64-bit-windows-7/ http://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/two-bit-problems-in-64-bit-windows-7/#comments Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:33:15 +0000 Ludwig https://ludwigkeck.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/two-bit-problems-in-64-bit-windows-7/ Continue reading →]]> My newly-built computer runs on 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate and is a pleasure to use. There are, however, a few “two-bit” (insignificant, cheap, tawdry) problems that are like glaring little blemishes on a shiny new toy.

My habit has been to import photos from my camera using Windows Live Photo Gallery, then to add some metadata to the files in Windows Explorer and finally to move the folder with the new pictures to my data drive. That had been an almost automatic routine on my old computer. But now annoyances showed up.

Windows Explorer gets confused

Just as I complete the move of a folder from My Pictures to another location using drag and drop there is a gong and this: “Location is not available”.

This is followed by an even more annoying “Windows Explorer has stopped working”. The open Windows Explorer windows become unresponsive and shortly close down. The first couple of times this was quite scary. I tried to figure out the exact problem but have not been able to do so. What is more, the problem seems to have abated. Did I change the way I move a folder? I don’t think so. Did Windows adapt to my habit? That would be astonishing. My reason for bringing up this problem is to assure others who might run into this, that theirs is not a unique situation. And, maybe, someone can explain the fault to me.

Windows Explorer can’t show thumbnails of NEF files

After importing photos I like to see them in the newly created folder in My Pictures and to add some common data, like author and copyright information. Windows 7 in the 64-bit version has made that impossible. This is not a fault of Windows but of Nikon, the creator of the NEF format. Nikon does not provide a 64-bit codec for their NEF files. Nikon is not the only company that has been tardy in supporting 64-bit computing. They are a camera company after all. But how many more years must we wait? 

But wait! Let Live Photo Gallery open after import – it shows the thumbnails just fine – and after that Windows Explorer will display the thumbnails and the larger image in the preview pane beautifully. Another self-healing event? Windows Live Photo Gallery is a 32-bit application, the Nikon codec works fine with it, although it can’t edit NEF files – not a serious problem as I always convert to JPG format any pictures that I want to enhance or otherwise edit. Does it provide the thumbnails? I am afraid to tinker lest I upset the apple cart again.

Windows Explorer can’t modify metadata of NEF files

Windows Explorer is not able to add information to a NEF file in the Details pane. Actually it will let you type in the text but on clicking Save it shows an error message.

How about using the Properties dialog? For files, you can normally edit the various “properties” and thus add or modify much of the metadata. This does not work for NEF files. The property fields are empty and do not show a text entry box.

There is a work-around. As non-intuitive as this may seem, when the property dialog is opened from inside Windows Live Photo Gallery, it works.

So instead of right-clicking on a thumbnail in Windows Explorer, right-click on a thumbnail in Live Photo Gallery and click Properties.

This dialog looks just like the one invoked from Windows Explorer, but behold, it works!

Here you can add comments, authors, copyright and some other information and you can see the data for other properties, like dimensions, which is not possible from Windows Explorer.

Three thumbs up for Windows Live Photo Gallery! Hope this works for you as well.

Windows can’t find backup drive

Most of us like to regularly back up the data on our computer to an external hard disk drive. Normally these are connected to a USB port. I did this shortly after I commissioned my new computer. All went well until the next scheduled backup. An error message came up “Windows cannot find the disk or network location where your backups are being saved.” – Frightening message!

The illustration here shows the Backup and Restore window with (portions) of two other windows: Windows Explorer and the backup setup dialog.  In the Backup and Restore window where the error message is displayed, note that it also shows the name and free space of the drive. Windows Explorer shows the external drive just fine (right side), but the setup dialog for changing the backup file location does not show the external hard drive.

This happened repeatedly, rebooting and resetting the backup details got it going, but at the next scheduled backup time, Windows again got lost. This problem also healed itself after I made a small change: In the Device Properties dialog for the drive I selected “Better Performance” to enable write caching in Windows. This, I thought, would speed up the backup performance with the drawback that the drive can’t be just unplugged but must be disconnected carefully when all writing is finished. That is not a problem for a backup drive that stays connected most of the time.

Ever since that little change, my computer finds the backup drive just fine and does its job.

What other problems will heal themselves? Maybe the great power in Redmond knows, as for me, I have stopped calling myself “knowledgeable in the ways of computing”.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

.:.

To illustrate the situation, I will provide a couple of examples.

Windows Live Photo Gallery stores copies of the original photos whenever any changes, such as cropping or exposure corrections, are made. There is an option “Revert to original” that allows going back to the image before any changes were made. That is a very important and useful feature. The “originals”, really copies of the starting image, are stored in a normally hidden folder. Windows Live Photo Gallery provides access to this folder in the Options menu, under the “Originals” tab. When you open that folder it looks about like the illustration here. It does not really tell you where the folder or the files are. Clicking on the down arrowhead in the address bar, reveals the location: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images, where “username” is your name. The default for Live Photo Gallery is to store these copies of the originals indefinitely. If you want to move these images to your new machine you need to do so manually. There is no warning or other indication in Windows Easy Transfer that this situation exists and that these files will be left behind.

Now it may well be that these “originals” are not treasures to you but just trash. But if they are treasures, copy them to an external drive. Warning: If you have a large number of photos and have kept these originals, the space needed may be quite large, and I mean many gigabytes, so you may need a large external hard drive. The good news is that after you have installed Windows Live Photo Gallery on your new computer it will have created the folder for the originals. Open the folder as described above and copy the originals from the external device. Live Photo Gallery will work and be able to revert to the original – at least it did for me in all my tests.

Another example: When you customize Google Earth with location pushpins, photo links, or other features, it writes the appropriate data to “kml” files and saves them in your AppData folder. These files are not copied by Windows Easy Transfer. When you install Google Earth on your new machine, any customization you made in your old computer just is not there. The customization files are located in a folder deep inside your AppData folder on the old machine. Where did I find them in the first place? They where in the “Roaming” subfolder under Google Earth. I found that copying them to the same location on the new computer just did not work. So I created a new folder in My Documents and copied the files to that folder. Using the File > Open dialog in Google Earth I could add my kml files and now Google Earth on the new computer shows my “treasures”.

My recommendation is that you keep your old computer with all that is on it until you have installed all your application on the new one and tested them out. Most programs are easily configured and will create the needed data that they store in the AppData folders.

Much of what is left behind in the AppData folders is indeed trash, but there may be some treasures that you will want to find and move to your new machine.

Other posts about Windows Easy Transfer:

Windows Easy Transfer, moving to new computer, moving files, AppData, application data

Moving to a new computer using Windows Easy Transfer

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

.:.

A bit of background: My old laptop computer has served for more than half a decade. It started out as a Windows XP machine that I used for developing software at clients’ sites. So a great deal of development software came and went. After my retirement, it became my primary computer as older gear was retired or died. Twice the operating system was replaced. The hard drive had been partitioned and various operating systems installed and removed. Now it runs Vista Ultimate, but poorly. The disk is full and does not have enough free space to upgrade to Windows 7. Hence my move to a new computer.

The Windows Easy Transfer application, “ET”, was much help. As I mentioned, there were surprises. In this post my topic is files, folders and disk drives. Here is a view of Windows Explorer of a clean, new Windows 7 machine.

This machine has but one hard drive, “Local Disk (C:)”. There are only four folders, “Program files”, “Program Files (x86)” – this is a 64-bit computer, hence the extra program folder for 32-bit applications, “Users”, and “Windows”. Windows Easy Transfer only touches the “Users” folder, the others are operating system and applications which are not affected in the move.

The primary folders containing user data are in the “user” folder and segregated by users of the machine. These are “My Documents”, “My Music”, “My Pictures”, and others like “Desktop” and “Favorites”. The contents of these are copied by “ET”.

In addition “ET” copies files and folders residing on the old “C:” drive other than the system folders. It places them into the “C:” drive on the new machine. If there are partitions, “drives”, on the old machine the folders in those partitions are also copied over to the “C:” drive on the new computer. At least that is what happened in  my move, it it resulted in a royal mess!

My advice is, and I hope I will remember to follow this the next time, to create a new folder on each drive and move all the contents of the drive into that folder. With a name like “My old drive E” the stuff can be more easily recognized and then put into an appropriate location on the new computer.

There was a lot of detritus on my old computer, all of which was copied to the new machine. An old Windows XP “Start Menu” folder (neither Vista nor Windows 7 uses that), with an old link to start a program that ceased to exist five years ago, was placed into my C: drive. Even an old “autoexec.bat” file came over.  Neither “Disk Cleanup”, nor “CCleaner” on the old (or new) computer got rid of this unneeded garbage. I am still picking out the trash. So, beware, do a manual inspection and cleanup of your old computer before using “ET”.

One pleasant surprise was “God Mode”. On my old machine I have a folder with a special name that provides access to the tools in control panel, but in one easily scrolled list (Windows Explorer can sort and display the list in a variety of ways). I have a desktop shortcut to this folder – which was also copied over – and as the folder was also copied, this icon actually works properly on the new machine.

If you are interested in this you can search the Internet for “God Mode”. You will find that you need to create a new folder on your boot drive (C:) and rename it to:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} The first part, here “GodMode”, can actually be anything, but the rest, including the period, must be as shown here. Then create s shortcut to this folder. When clicked, Windows Explorer opens with a display like this:

On my computer the list of tools is 278 items long. If you are a geek, you need this. If you are not, you definitely don’t need it.

There were some items that “ET” did not copy over, I will discuss some of those in another post.

Also see:

Moving to a new computer using Windows Easy Transfer

Treasures left behind by Windows Easy Transfer

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

.:.

The old machine runs Vista, there was insufficient storage space available to upgrade. The new one has plenty of disk space and runs 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate. I installed Microsoft Office 2010, the Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft Security Essentials, and a number of other programs.

Then I started the move. This is not a “how to” article, that may come after I finish. There are chores that should be done before making a move, I learned the hard way.

My decision to use Microsoft Easy Transfer was an easy one, I had helped friends with moves using this utility and the process went smoothly. The program promises to transfer user accounts, documents, music, pictures, email, internet favorites, videos, “and more”. It does not transfer programs, those have to be installed individually on the new computer, but it should take care of the majority of the chores.

Windows Easy Transfer can accomplish the move over a special “Easy Transfer” cable, over a network, or using an external hard drive or USB flash drive. Since I already owned a transfer cable, I selected that option. With the cable connected, I started the utility on both machines. No joy. Another try, still no connection. Then the language in the Windows Easy Transfer dialog started to make sense.

I had selected “I already installed it on my old computer”. Yes, Vista comes with it, but that does not work for transferring to Windows 7. See the third option in the illustration, it says “My old computer is running Windows 7”.

So I plugged in a USB flash drive on the new computer and allowed “ET” to copy the utility with the “I need to install it now” option. That worked smoothly and the the transfer proceeded.

It is usually desirable to start with the good news and hold the bad until last. The good news is that the files transferred as expected. The desktop background, a custom image on the old machine, was now on the new one as were all the desktop items, icons and shortcuts. When I started Internet Explorer it looked just like the one on the old computer. The favorites bar, all the favorites were there, clicking on “Live Home” (my tab to go to live.com) brought up all the accounts from the old machine, complete with remembered passwords. I had installed Roboform, and it too brought up the “passcards”. Neat.

Starting Windows Live Mail brought the first disappointment, no email accounts. Outlook also returned a blank stare. Setting up my accounts took some time. My main “outlook.pst” file had been copied over, but it needed to be “imported” and the accounts needed to be set up again. Live Mail accounts also needed to be set up on the new computer. Then Outlook and Live Mail needed a long time to synchronize and download all the old mail.

How about, Windows Live Writer? I had already seen that all the drafts and recent posts were there in the “My Weblog Posts” folder in Documents. Sorry, it started with “Configure Windows Live Writer”. There was work to be done. So this is the first post from my new computer. I will share more of my experience in future posts, for now, “this is a test”.

Also see:

Moving disks, folders and files with Windows Easy Transfer

Treasures left behind by Windows Easy Transfer

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

.:.

Organizing starts in the camera

Digital cameras assign file names to the photos. There are usually several options that the photographer can set. In my case, I want continuously advancing numbers so there will be no file name conflicts in the future. Many cameras also offer options to set comments. This can be used to identify the subject matter or location. Since the process for setting this is tedious, I just use comments to attach my name to each file. My camera does not have a GPS unit installed, but some can annotate photos with the geographic coordinates. All these option can make organizing of the photos much easier.

Importing from the camera

The import step is, of course, the first task after the pictures have been taken. My approach is to connect the camera to my computer with a USB cable and let the import process start automatically when I turn the camera on. (How do I import photos from my camera to my computer?) I have set the options in Windows Live Photo Gallery as shown in the illustration here. The folder name consists of the date taken plus any name assigned during the import process, and the file names are set to use what the camera assigned.

The reason for this is to support my “organizing” scheme. The folders start with a date, they thus will list in date order. This makes going back to the photos easiest for me. Every three months, I move the latest folders to a “year and quarter” folder so the length of the list will not get out of hand.

The import process allows me to add text, a “name”, for a group of photos behind the date for the folder name. This makes it easy to identify my pictures when looking down the list in Windows Explorer or in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Another option in the import process is the addition of tags. When groups of photos have a common subject or place, assigning the appropriate tags right there saves a lot of time.

The camera-assigned file names are not completely satisfactory for me. My scheme is to replace the first four characters, which the camera sets to “DSC_”, with my initials, a camera “identifier”, and a “sequence” character that I will advance once the count reaches 9999 for this camera. (How do I replace the DSC prefix on my photo file names?) This makes all my file names unique and I can copy files from any folder to “album” folders without having to worry about any file name duplications. More on that in another installment.

Windows Explorer, in the Details pane, also permits assigning titles, the author’s name, tags and comments. I make use of that by selecting the photos and making the appropriate additions right in the Details pane.

One other item that I include in the metadata of my photos is a copyright notice. There is a place for that, but it is not shown in the Details pane or in the information pane of Live Photo Gallery. I select all the photos in a new folder, right-click on one of them and select Properties.

On the Details tab various annotations are displayed and most can be changed. Here is where I enter the copyright information.

The remaining detailed tagging I do in Windows Live Photo Gallery. That is also where “people tags” can easily be assigned. When a photo is selected that shows people, Photo Gallery will recognize the faces and ask “Who is this?” or ask to verify the identity if it matches the face to existing photos. This is very neat.

There is also a place in the Photo Gallery information pane to set a “geotag”. The procedure is awkward and the results generally unsatisfactory. You enter a city, or an exact address, and Photo Gallery sets geographic coordinates. Obviously, when you just say “New York City”, the coordinates will be for the general location and not the exact place where you took the picture. If there are already GPS coordinates in the photo’s metadata, Photo Gallery provides the place name. That is nice.

There is a marvelous tool, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, that integrates beautifully with Bing Maps and allows setting exact geographic coordinates. I wrote about it in Metadata: Geotagging and More with Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer supports this program, a real pity.

These are the basic steps for my approach to organizing my photos. The next steps are discussed in other installment of this topic.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig – the blog and my gateway to other blogs and photo galleries: Café Ludwig

.:.

If you try to open a single image in ICE you get: “Please select two or more images.”

Well, ICE can be tricked. Here is how.

Make a copy of your photo. Then load the original and the copy. ICE accepts them. Here is a demonstration. I have the photo shown on the left. I loaded the original and the copy and ICE processed the images.

Once the images are loaded into Image Composite Editor proceed:

In the Stich panel select Rotating Motion. Then click on the “cube” control for “Adjust projection and orientation”.

Now the adjustments are available. If the Projection setting is not already on Perspective, set it that way. Drag the image up until the perspective is corrected to your satisfaction. Making the vertical lines completely parallel, as I have done in these illustrations, is not the best setting. Leave a little bit of “tilt” to achieve a more realistic rendering.

Then click Apply.

The image will be stretched at the top so it now forms a trapezoid. You can save this image with the Export to disk button. But most pictures are shown in rectangular form. The Automatic Crop command in the Crop group sets the maximum rectangular area. It is easy then to drag the sides for the best crop.

ICE can also be set for the type of image file, and the compression quality for JPG and other formats that provide quality control. There is even an option to generate an additional thumbnail file.

After export of the corrected photo, Windows Live Photo Gallery can be used for the final corrections of exposure and color.

Here is my final version of this picture.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

Of course, inserting pictures is nicely handled. Once a photo is inserted, and selected, there is a “Picture Tools” tab on the Ribbon to permit a variety of edit functions.

What functions are available depends on the source location of the picture. On inserting there are two source options: “From your computer…” and “From the web…”. When inserting a picture that is sourced somewhere on the web – in my case normally from my SkyDrive – only the edit options that are supported normally in the browser are provided. The size of the picture can be specified. The alignment, the position in the text, and margins around the image can be modified. All the other edit options are greyed out. The reason is that the other edit option have to modify the actual image, something that is obviously not possible when the image exists already on the web.

Images that you source from your computer  can be edited locally. The modified picture is then uploaded to your blog site along with the post. This works very smoothly.

Let’s look at the edit options for manipulating an image.

Rotate and Tilt

Next to the “Size” field on the Ribbon is “Rotate”. The image can be flipped ninety degrees to the right or left. This can be repeated to turn the photo upside down. The really neat option in the “Rotate” field is “Tilt”. Clicking the “Tilt” command brings up a dialog with a slider to adjust the tilt from 20 degrees to the left to 20 degrees to the right. I am showing this dialog here with the tilt set to –10. This will actually produce a somewhat larger image with the titled picture inside. This image is then uploaded to the picture store on the blog site when the post is published. Some very nice effects can be achieved with this option.

Picture Styles

Frame

The next group on the “Picture Tools” Ribbon is “Picture styles”. This includes the rest of the image editing tools. Most prominent is are the framing options. The options, illustrated at the right, include the frame setting inherited from the blog template (the first one), no frame, drop shadow to make it appear slightly lifted from the page (selected and used for this illustration), an “instant photo” (Polaroid) frame – the image is cropped to a square format for this, a white “photopaper” effect, a reflection on the bottom as if the picture was sitting on a shiny surface, framed with rounded corners, or a thin (1 pixel), solid line, and lastly framed with a 3 pixel black line.

Picture Effects

The “Picture effects” option provides tools you might use somewhat less often. Photos that needed extensive enhancement were probable already edited using a picture editor or Windows Live Photo Gallery. However, when a picture is inserted and it looks like a bit of tweaking might help, the options are right at hand. The “Recolor” command provides just three “Color modes”: Turning the picture to a black-and-white or sepia image, or enhancing the colors, “Color pop”. The “Color temperature” offers two steps cooler or warmer.

Sharpen

There is just one level of sharpening offered. This is a fairly aggressive sharpening. Here

are a couple versions of the same photo showing the sharpening tool (applied to the right photo).

Blur and Emboss

These two effects also offer just one setting each. Using the same photo, here are illustrations of the two effects, blurred on the left, the embossed image on the right:

Contrast

The “Contrast” command brings up a dialog (shown here). There are two slider controls, “Brightness” and “Contrast”. These controls have a wider range than is common for such adjustments. Both go from –100 to 100. The setting shown in the windows can also be manually set by just typing in the value you want.

Watermark

The watermark option allows you to embed a visible message in a picture. The command opens a dialog for specifying the text and the text attributes. On opening, the dialog shows “© 2011” (unless you saved your own default message). You can replace this with any text you like. There is a font selector. Here any font on your computer can be used since this will become an actual modification of the image which is then uploaded. The size is more limited but offers a range of 8 to 36 which is perfectly adequate.

Crop

The crop control is part of the “Size” group. This is not available for images sourced from the web, so I did not mention it before. This tool also modifies the image prior to uploading to the blog image store. The tool provides the normal cropping functions including specifying the proportions and setting the proportions for a horizontal or vertical picture (“Rotate frame”).

So here, a picture with a variety of the edit options applied. You can see that Windows Live Writer is a powerful and versatile tool.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

• If you find a suitable image through a search, or other means, that image does not belong to you and you may not have permission to use it.
• Things on the web change all the time. Since you have no control over the source, the image may or may not be there the next time it is accessed.

So you should stick to showing pictures from sources under your control.

Before I go into details, allow me to address my less geeky readers. Many people, using Windows Live Writer, have no idea how images are handles and couldn’t care less. It just works. You select Insert – Picture > From your computer and Live Writer takes care of the rest. The photo is pasted in, you can select the size and that’s it. 

Here is an example. I inserted a screen-clip of an image of the header of this blog. The image is in my Pictures folder.

Here is the code that Live Writer generated for the image:

<p><a href=”$TnT-header[2].jpg“><img style=”background-image: none; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin: ; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px” title=”TnT-header” border=”0″ alt=”TnT-header” src=”$TnT-header_thumb.jpg” width=”244″ height=”57″></a></p>

I have bolded the references to the image. These are temporary references, when the post is published, Live Writer uploads the images to my folder in my WordPress account. It resolves the references in the code being uploaded and it is done.

For this demonstration, I uploaded this post as a draft (Publish – Post draft to blog). Here is what the code looks like up on WordPress:

<p><a href=”http://ludwigkeck.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/tnt-header.jpg”><img style=”background-image:none;padding-left:0;padding-right:0;display:inline;padding-top:0;border-width:0;” title=”TnT-header” border=”0″ alt=”TnT-header” src=”http://ludwigkeck.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/tnt-header_thumb.jpg“ width=”244″ height=”57″></a></p>

Notice that the the image references are now full hyperlinks to the images in my WordPress Media Library. I can see them in my Library folder.

If you look closely at the illustration here, you can also see that I have used very little of the storage space allocated to me for this blog. I have more than 98 % of the space remaining.

Over on my Windows Live SkyDrive I have much more space available and I have stored there a lot of my photos.

Now for the procedure of sourcing an image from SkyDrive.

This is a bit more complicated than the simple steps shown above. But this does not require you to be an expert webmaster or super-geek. You just need to be careful in following the steps.

Prepare your images. I like to copy the illustrations to a folder in Pictures. Then, using Windows Live Photo Gallery, I edit them and resize them to the exact size I want in the post. This isn’t really necessary, but that is what I recommend – see my post “Optimize your photos for speedy presentation”. Note that when Photo Gallery resizes a picture it makes a new file with the pixel size at the end. This makes picking the correct photo later on very easy.

Photo Gallery can upload your images directly to your SkyDrive. If you are signed in, just click the SkyDrive icon in the Share section of the Home Ribbon. You will be offered the selection of your albums so you can pick where the images are to be stored. I suggest you make a separate album for blog post images. If you make a new album, do not use “Blog images” for the name. I will explain a little farther down.

Once the upload is complete accept the offer to view the album online. (Or you can open it separately.)

Open Live Writer to work on your post.

In the separate browser window maneuver to your SkyDrive album and the image you wish to insert. Click on the image so it is shown on its own in the browser. Click in the browser address bar and copy the address (Ctrl+C). You can also get the address by right-clicking the image (in some browsers you need to select properties). I prefer just copying the address from the browser address bar.

Back in Live Writer, insert the image by choosing Insert – Picture > From the web… This opens a new Insert Web Image dialog. 

Enter the address of the image that you copied in the browser. Momentarily, a thumbnail of the image shows up in the dialog. Click Insert. The image will be inserted at the cursor location.

Click on the image. Now you can use the tools in the Picture Tools tab to adjust the size. I like to make sure the image is the correct size already so I can use Original size. This prevents Live Writer from generating a thumbnail and uploading it to the blog files.

In the Properties section of the Picture Tools Ribbon there is a “Link to” command. You can select None, Source picture, or Web address.

If you wish you readers to be able to see a full size presentation of your photo, obtain the address of the picture as explained above. Click Link to, select Web address.

A new dialog opens to permit you to enter the web address.

There is an additional feature. If you do not see the Title text box, click Advanced. Whatever you enter in the Title box will be shown as a screen tip when the mouse pointer is moved over the picture.

Of course, you can link to any other web address from the picture. This includes a slide show of an album on your SkyDrive. I explained that in more detail in my post Spaces to WordPress – photos and slide shows – Pages. Windows Live slide shows do not work in all browsers.

Earlier in this post I warned against using “Blog images” as the name of your SkyDrive folder for blog images. This is the name used by Windows Live for the Spaces blog images. If you moved over from Spaces to WordPress, the transfer process copied the images from that album to the Media Library on WordPress. It also moved the blog posts and resolved the links to the photos. This process was quite trouble free. I have found a few images that did not show up the specified size in the replicated posts, but nothing of consequence.

After copying the images from the Blog images album, the transfer process left the original album just as it was. All the images from Spaces posts are still there. Nothing references them now. So you could delete the album, or keep it as a historic relic from the glory days of Windows Live Spaces.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

If you have not already done so, click on the image for a larger size view. The photo on this page is not of bad quality, is it? I don’t mean artistic quality, but how well detail and colors are rendered on the page. A bit of explanation for my less knowledgeable readers: To show a picture in a browser window, that picture has to be downloaded from some server on the web, and possibly rescaled, before it can be displayed. It stands to reason that this can be done faster for a smaller file size.

The size of the file of this picture as it came out of the camera was 8.5 megabytes. It would take a long time to download that file. The file size of the picture on this page is only 75 kilobytes, (kB), less than a hundredth of the original! Even the large picture you saw by clicking on the photo has a file size of  only 790 kilobytes. More than ten times larger, yet less than ten times the size of the original.

What I did, and what you can do as well, is to reduce the size of the picture. On this page it is 540 by 361 pixels (this may show slightly different in some browsers). There is just no need for the full size of about 3800 by 2600 pixels., even the large view is just 1200 by 803 pixels.

There is one other step I took in reducing the file size. The photo here in in JPG format. This format allows file compression to different quality levels. Compressed to the size here, at quality level 100% yields a file size of 222 kilobytes. The picture above is compressed to 80% quality, reducing the file size about three times more to just 75 kB.

Can you tell the difference? Hardly. Only when the image is inspected at large scale do the compression artifacts show.

The left image above shows an enlargement of the bee photo  – 80% quality, the one on the right of the same photo at 100% quality. Click the picture to see it larger. Note that there is really no detectable difference in the fine detail. Differences show up mostly in the otherwise smooth areas. So, for essentially unnoticeable differences, we get a three times file size reduction!

Can you do this easily? Certainly. I use Windows Live Photo Gallery. When processing JPG images there is a setting to define the compression level – quality. The default setting is 98%. Click the File tab > Options > Edit. Set the slider to the desired quality level. This will be applied when you edit, export, or resize a picture.

Warning! JPG is a “lossy” compression technology. When compressed, some detail is lost and some “artifacts” show up. This cannot be reversed. So keep the quality setting at a high level when editing or enhancing the photo. Apply the lower quality as the last step when resizing or exporting the picture. Be sure to return the setting to the higher quality level as Live Photo Gallery remembers the last setting.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

…

Tags can help readers find related posts. WordPress tags are shown right below or above a post on the blog home site. When a reader clicks on a tag phrase ,a page opens showing WordPress posts that were similarly tagged. These are from all bloggers not just your own. Indeed, yours might not show near the top at all. But you have helped your reader! There is an attractive way to assist your reader find your own posts. That is the “Tag Cloud” Widget. Since many of my readers see this post in syndication, I have included an illustration here. Note: The illustration here is not a live tag cloud. On my blog home site, This ‘n That, the live tag cloud is in the sidebar.  Those readers also do not get to see the WordPress tags by the post. If you are reading this post on my blog site and if you want to see how this post looks in Windows Live, click here.

You can pretty well define the tags you use however you like. Keep in mind that if your tag phrases are completely unique, others will not be using them. Such tags will not refer readers to other blogs, nor readers from other blogs to your site. Making tags too generic also will not be very helpful. This post uses the tag “tags”. There are many kinds of tags, so this referral may be of little value. I also have used “blogging tags” and “post tags”, those are more specific and should lead to much more useful material.

There are a number of websites that index blogs and help readers find related blog posts. Technorati is one such service; you can see Technorati tags at the bottom of this post. Here again, well constructed and common tag phrases are most helpful, overly generic ones just offer too many unrelated choices. Try the “tags” and “blogging tags” links to get better acquainted with what I am trying to say.

Windows Live Writer makes adding tags from various providers very easy. Just click Post Tags on the Insert tab of the Ribbon. See illustration here.

I also use Clubhouse tags. You may find that Clubhouse tags all lead to the “front door” of the “Clubhouse”, a place to learn about Windows and for geeks and gurus to share their knowledge. I have more to say on that in another post.

This post is the last in my series on “Spaces to WordPress”, however, I will have other posts on blogging. I hope I have been of some help in making the transition easier.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

Windows Live Spaces Photos modules playing slide shows

These modules are not moved to WordPress when the invitation to move the blog is accepted. WordPress, however, offers “Pages” to fashion a gallery to your liking.

Setting up a page on a WordPress blog site is very similar to preparing a blog post. When using Windows Live Writer just start by selecting New page instead of New post. The procedure is described in detail by technogran in her post From Spaces to WordPress step by step. Creating a Page.

WordPress does not offer a slide show feature that connects to an album. It does have a slide show option for a set of images. Setting that up is a bit complicated, again I will let technogran guide you through the steps: Adding a Slideshow of your photos to a blog post in WordPress.

When a blog is moved from Spaces to WordPress, none of the items in SkyDrive are removed or changed. All of the photo albums stay just as they are. Of course, the nice access to them from the Spaces page is gone. It is very easy to create a picture with a link to a SkyDrive photo album. Here is how – when using Windows Live Writer:

• Click the Insert tab.
• Click Photo album.

The options are: Create online album… and Add online album… The first option is for selecting pictures from you computer and uploading them. The second option is for connecting to an existing album. Actually the next dialog allows making this choice as well. If you are signed in, the dialog goes right to your SkyDrive and displays your albums.

• Click on the album thumbnail.
• Click Insert.

The pictures from the album will be downloaded to create thumbnail images. An album display is inserted. The Photo Album Tools ribbon will also be displayed. Here you can choose the appearance. The default is shown at right. For this post I have chosen the Scatter option. Another command on the ribbon allows you to Shuffle the thumbnails until you find just the display you like.

Here, then is the example display. Note that the album title has been added automatically. There are links below to view the pictures as a slide show or to download them. I don’t particularly care for this last option. It is fine when sharing photos with friends, but here we have a page on a public site offering your photos. Please respect my property, these are copyrighted images and are not for your use, just your enjoyment here.

A walk in the park VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

In some browsers you might not see the slide show just the album page.

You can also connect an individual picture to a slide show of an album on your SkyDrive.

Open a browser window to your SkyDrive Photos page. Pick the album you wish to show on your new WordPress page. Select a representative photo to become the “title”. Display the photo full size and copy (Crtl+C)the URL from the browser address box.

• From the Insert group on the Home tab click Picture. Select From the web.
• Then paste the URL into the Picture web address: box. A preview will shortly show up in the dialog. C
• lick Insert. Most likely the picture will be way oversize.
• Click on it to display the Picture Tools ribbon and select the size you like. If the options Small, Medium, and Large don’t offer just the right size, you can just enter the width in the size box, with Lock aspect ratio set (it is the default), Writer will resize (downward only!) to the size you entered.

Now the picture is placed on your page. You can adjust the position as you like. There is one more step, that is to place a hyperlink on the picture to the slide show of your album.

• So back in the browser click the back button to get to the page showing the photo.
• Click Slide show.
• When the slide show starts click in the browser address bar and copy the URL.
• Back to Live Writer. Click on the picture to select it.
• Click the Home tab.
• Click Hyperlink in the Insert group. Enter the URL in the Web address box.
• Enter a title for the slide show in the Title box. This will be displayed when a pointer hovers over the picture.

That’s it. Here is an example – here, of course, in this post.

There is a lot more versatility in what you can do. For example if you select the title images from your computer rather than the web, you can tilt them. You are not limited to linking to your SkyDrive albums, you can link to other sites like Flickr. The procedure is pretty much the same. On my Photo Gallery page I have a number of examples of what can be done. I have links to examples on PhotoSynth, Zoom.it, and a YouTube video. Go take a look:  This ‘n That – Photo Gallery.

One important caution: When displaying material on your site, be sure that you have rights to do so. Just because something is on the web does not mean that it is free for the taking. Here all examples are my own work.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

The procedure seemed to work, but the blog did not show up in my profile. I consulted friends – yes, I was doing it right. I asked for help from Microsoft – no different advise there. I tried several more times – the insanity thingie, I know – the blog just would not register.

With much grumbling and unhappiness I went about my business telling my readers about the chores of moving a blog. Here is the list of my recent posts:

• Goodbye Spaces!
• Moving from Spaces to WordPress – The Task
• Spaces to WordPress – the Move
• Spaces to WordPress – new Look, new Language
• Spaces to WordPress – Modules to Widgets
• Spaces to WordPress – photos and slide shows – Widgets

Earlier today I was doing some routine maintenance on my website. On the management page I clicked the Edit command – nothing happened. Not the next time either. Then I remembered that in Facebook a command did not work either, didn’t bother me at the time. Could it be???

Quickly I logged in on another computer – a Windows 7 machine using Internet Explorer 8. The edit worked. Facebook worked. So I tried adding my new blog to my Clubhouse profile. Worked like a charm as you can see!

The problem? I have been using Internet Explorer 9 beta. Even reported several concerns. Yes, the problem is somewhere in IE9beta – at least on my own machine – some actions just do not get carried out. No warning, no chime, nothing, just no results.

Of course, beta releases are there just to find these little problems. It is fun to ride the cutting edge and be among the first to experience new features. Unfortunately, cutting edges are sharp and can inflict injury – as it turns out, to my blogging and to my pride!

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

WordPress.com does not have a slide show Widget. There is a nice “Image” Widget. There is also a “Flickr” Widget that brings in the latest photos from you Flickr photostream. The “Text” Widget can also be used to display photos, although this is a more complicated process. Widgets, of course, can only reside in Widget areas, normally a sidebar. On some themes Widgets can also reside in footer areas.

One or more additional “page” can be used to provide a more gallery style display of photos. The page option I will hold for my next post.

Image Widget

I have several Image Widgets in the right sidebar (you may need to scroll to see them). They are set to connect to slide shows. One of the Image Widgets is illustrated at right to show the hover message.

Here is how to specify the details. When an Image Widget is dragged to Widget location the Widget menu opens. There are text entry boxes to specify the title, and other parameters. for the illustrated Widget this is “Winged Subjects”. Next is the Image URL:. For this one I got the address of an image from my SkyDrive. I entered “click to view slide show” in Image title: – this is seen when the pointer moves over the picture (see illustration above). The text entered in the  Caption: box shows under the picture.

I selected Center for Image Alignment:. The size specification is a bit tricky. For width you want to specify a size appropriate for the sidebar width – this will be the same for all your Image widgets. For height a value tis needed that maintains the picture proportions – this you may need to calculate for each photo. In Link URL: I specified the address of the slide show of a Shutterfly album.

The “…Parks and Gardens…” Image Widget connects to a SkyDrive slide show. Some browser may not display the slide show and just show the album with thumbnail images (this is temporary as SkyDrive is undergoing many changes [October 2010]).

Flickr Widget

Also in the sidebar of this blog page there is a Flickr Widget. This displays the latest few photos uploaded to a Flickr account. The options are, beside the RSS feed URL, the number of images to show and image size (either Thumbnail or Small). I specified Small which is actually just a little too big for the sidebar, but it works. When the images are clicked, the photo on the Flickr page is shown. This does not provide for slide shows.

Text Widget

A Text Widget can also be used to do fairly fancy stuff. I use, and recommend to all, Windows Live Writer to set up the text, images, and hyperlinks. The only precaution is that the images must reside somewhere on the web. The source code is then copied from the Source window and pasted into the Text Widget.

You can see the actual result in the sidebar.

I used small pictures from a Windows Live Spaces blog. These reside in a SkyDrive folder that remains on my SkyDrive even after the contents of the blog module is moved to WordPress (the process makes copies of images and loads them into the WordPress Media Library).

The photos, of course, remain on SkyDrive. So the slide show links are to SkyDrive Photos slide shows.

As you can see, using Widgets can accomplish quite a bit. These are attractive work-arounds for Windows Live Spaces Photos modules. In my next post I will go into more detail on using “pages” for even nicer ways to show off photos and slide shows. For a peek ahead just click on Photo Gallery in the menu bar at the top of this page.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

In this post the topic is Modules in Spaces and how to get similar functions with the Widgets in WordPress. In the move all of the Modules, except the contents of the Blog module, were lost. Some of the modules were of a non-personal nature, like weather and stock market status, the loss of these is more of an annoyance than a hardship. In WordPress the similar tools are “Widgets”. Most Widgets are oriented to blogging needs. For a good overview on installing Widgets please visit technogran’s tittle tattle, her post on Widgets is:

• From Spaces to WordPress step by step. Adding some Widgets.

Very popular and useful were the various lists and the photo Modules. I will take up photos in my next post, here the emphasis is on lists. WordPress has no similar Widgets.

Windows Live Spaces list Modules were very easy to use; for music, books, the user needed only provide some of the information and the Spaces module would search for the needed information,  including thumbnail images. It is not possible to recreate the complete functionality of the Spaces lists Modules, however, the contents and links can be constructed using the WordPress Text Widget.

Moving the contents of your lists requires that you have set up a WordPress blog and have not yet moved your Spaces blog over to it, so that your Spaces page is still accessible. (If you have already moved, all is not lost, I will explain further on.)

I will use my “Book list” module to illustrate the process. The illustration shows how it appeared on the Spaces page. As already mentioned, the information can be brought over, the layout and appearance will not be moved.

Here is a step-by-step procedure for recreating a Spaces list in a WordPress blog.

• Open you Spaces page in a browser window.
• Open Windows Live Writer 2011. (If you don’t have that get is from Windows Live Writer 2011) – Don’t enter a blog title, this will be just a temporary use.
• Select all the content of the list on your Spaces page. I like to start at the bottom end and select upwards – it seems to be easier to define the exact area.
• Paste the selection into Live Writer (Ctrl+V). It will look a bit like the illustration on the right. The thumbnail images are there, and also the titles and authors of the books together with the hyperlinks. You can do some editing if you like as I have done in my list.
• Click on the Source tab (lower left). This shows the HTML code.
• In a browser window sign in to you WordPress account.
• Go to your Dashboard. In the nav pane on the left under Appearance click Widgets. (You may need to click the down-arrow next to Appearance to see the sub-menu items.)
• Drag a Text Widget from the Available Widgets area to a Widget area (on the right).

• In the Title: box enter the title you wish to display for the Widget.
• Back in Live Writer select and copy everything in the Source window. (Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C).
• Over in the browser, showing your Text Widget box, paste the code (Ctrl+V). It will now look something like the picture on the right.
• Click the Save button.
• You can close Live Writer and discard the draft. I decided to save mine (with the text box title prefixed with “widget”) so I can find it and change or add to it later on.

So how does it look? You can see my book list in the sidebar of my blog. (you may have to scroll a bit). 

Just in case you are wondering, the thumbnail images that the Spaces books module used are images from Amazon.com (residing on one of their servers). In the steps I presented you did not save those images to your computer or to your Media Library in WordPress.

If you have moved your Spaces blog over to WordPress already, you cannot follow the procedure above since your Spaces page is gone. Fortunately, the information contained in your lists is preserved (at least for now, October 2010). You can retrieve the information but is not as easy a process as described above. here is how you can get to your old Spaces lists information:

• Sign in to your Windows Live account. This takes you to your home page.
• Click Profile (near your name on the upper right).
• Click twice in the address bar so you can edit the address.
• Append “lists” (without the quotes) after the ending slash (“/”) to the address and press enter.

You will see your old Spaces lists page, somewhat like the illustration here.

• Click on any of the list titles to go to the list.

You can retrieve the information from there. Again, just select the material and paste it into a Live Writer window. You will need to do a bit more editing to get rid of the extraneous Edit, Delete and other unwanted items. From there proceed as described above.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig

The look and feel of WordPress blogging sites are a culture shift for “Spacers”. The site layout and features are different and the language used to describe elements is different as well. When moving over, the default “theme” used on WordPress is “Twenty Ten” (currently, in October 2010). This blog uses that theme, so I will use it to describe some of the other elements and features.

WordPress “Themes” –  there are nearly a hundred – are more restrictive than the themes on Spaces. There you could rearrange the layout and modules, resize modules and change font and sizes for title and other elements. On WordPress a “theme” brings with it a fixed look, page width, font, and location of “widgets”. “Widgets” are similar to modules on Spaces.

Take a look at the illustration here. This shows the layout of theme “Twenty Ten”.

The blog title and slogan are fixed in location and size (see the top of this blog), that is followed by a header image. This image is optional, but when used (default) its size is fixed. There are many images to choose from, or you can upload your own as I have done here. The main area shows the most recent post. There is a “side bar” to the right where the “Widgets” are placed. Widgets are of fixed width. For the Twenty Ten theme there are two areas in the sidebar (labeled 1 and 2 in the illustration). These areas adjust in length to the size and number of widgets. The Twenty Ten theme has four additional areas for widgets on the bottom (labeled F1, F2, F3, F4 – they are called First, Second … Footer Widget Area ..).

There are additional features that have no equivalent in Live Spaces, but those are for another post.

How do you use the Widgets, and make other customizations? I will go into some of these in future posts, but will not cover the details as they are very well described in a series of posts on “Technogran’s tittle tattle” – in particular:

• From Spaces to WordPress step by step. General Settings.
• From Spaces to WordPress step by step. Adjusting other Settings.

You will find much useful guidance there.

Please also visit my blog on “things photographic”: Café Ludwig