Print
Windows Live Essentials 2011, now available in a public beta, is the local client component of Microsoft Windows Live, a collection of programs and web services. WLE 2011’s components include photo editing and organization (WL Photo Gallery), video editing (WL Movie Maker), email and calendar (WL Mail), instant messaging and social media (WL Messenger), blogging (WL Writer), cross-platform file synchronization and Windows remote access (WL Sync), and web and IM filtering (WL Family Safety). Before the public beta was released in late June, Windows Live Essentials 2011 was known as Windows Live Essentials Wave 4. In this article, you’ll learn what new and improved features the latest WLE wave brings with it.
Most of WLE 2011’s applications now feature an Office 2007-style ribbon menu to enable easier access to new and improved features. However, the improvements are more than skin-deep. WLE 2011’s components now feature better integration with each other and with the online portions of Windows Live. For example, slide shows in WL Photo Gallery can be converted into WL Movie Maker auto movies with just a couple of clicks or can be published online to Windows Live SkyDrive’s 25GB of cloud-based storage.
WLE 2011 also plays nicely with others, with integrated support for Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube and the ability to share social messaging from Facebook and MySpace with WL Messenger. You can also add support for many other services.
The downside? WLE 2011 is designed for use with Windows 7, and will also work on Windows Vista, but Windows XP users are out of luck. For now, you can still get the previous version of Windows Live Essentials, but after you see what you can do with the 2011 version, you might be ready to give up XP for 7.
As with previous versions (and its Windows Vista ancestor, Windows Photo Gallery), WL Photo Gallery is designed to organize photos and perform light-duty editing. In this edition, WL Photo Gallery provides many more features for both organization and editing.
People tagging has now been enhanced with face recognition. When you select a photo for people tagging, WLPG automatically highlights each face in the photo and prompts you to tag them. You can also manually highlight other faces and tag them with their Windows Live contact names or names you enter manually.
The more you use people tagging with face recognition, the smarter the feature becomes: as WLPG “learns” the characteristics of each face, it can tag or suggest tagging the same people in other photos.
When it’s time to find a few favorite photos out of an immense forest of digital images, WLPG 2011 makes searches simpler as well. The Quick Find menu on the Home tab provides face-based searches as well as calendar, star rating and flagged/non-flagged lookups.
Switch to the Find tab for more advanced options, including AND/OR searches, star rating searches by specified rating, specified rating and higher (or lower), selected or most-used tags, and free text search to find photos by people tags, descriptive tags, or geotags. You can also pin a search to make it available at all times.
The Edit tab now features a customizable auto adjust repair tool, individual automatic tools to straighten, improve exposure, improve color, and remove noise, and the ability to select a group of photos for automatic repairs. User-controlled repair tools are now found in the Fine Tune menu, including a new Retouch tool for removing small flaws such as dust and scratches and an improved Reduce Noise tool that maintains detail while reducing JPEG artifacts.
New goodies on the Create tab include Photo Fuse, which enables you to combine the best parts of two or more photos into a single image, an enhanced Movie command that interfaces with WL Movie Maker 2011, and easy access to additional Microsoft photo editing tools such as PhotoSynth and Collage Pro.
Comments are closed on this article
Fecal Face
January 21, 2011 at 2:36pm
Hmm, looks like you have 69760 unread emails. Might want to get on that ;P
BAMT
July 22, 2010 at 11:39am
@stradric
But isn't it quicker to hit alt+x then the hotkey of the menu item than it is to click? That's how I work, anyway.
And yes, I know the obviousness that is the control hotkeys still working. I like alt combinations, too.
Edit: Jeeze, why doesn't my comment go where it should? It must be because I'm a minority with Opera on Linux.
michaelh
July 22, 2010 at 8:28am
If some users like the Ribbon, why not have both? The same selections are available via icons or menus, would a GUI choice be so difficult? I use the suite regularly though not at length and I've adapted just fine to some of the one-click operations. There are too many previously simple operations that now require burrowing into sub-menus. When their headers were straightforward I could navigate to what I needed, now I've got to put myself in a WYSIWYG devotee's mindset.
It's like the Win 7 default Start menu operation. The recently-used applications list slows me down and requires an extra click to get to what I want. I don't have anything against interface streamlining - great options for those that don't need more - just give us choices that doesn't require user mods or registry hacks.
The Live Essentials suite seems to promote more of the same philosophy. The backbone options are too well hidden for my tastes.
fociwm
July 22, 2010 at 7:59am
Unlike other people, I like ribbon. Why? Because I didn't really get used to menu even after about 10 years of using office suite. It was difficult to find what I wanted. On the other hand, ribbon was very intuitive, and therefore easy to understand. Now I use several new functions just because I found them in ribbon.
As you may blame, I'm not a power user. But I'm just a steady user. And with ribbon, I am able to use the word and powerpoint much more powerfully and more efficiently. I have to admit I was too lazy to learn and practice Word and Powerpoint. But it was just enough with menus during those 10 years. Now I'm doing my job much better. So except for power users who spent a lot of time in learning the office, ribbon was definitely improvement.
stradric
July 22, 2010 at 6:58am
With Live Essentials comes the 'Windows Live Sign-In Assistant'. This service is now famous for breaking SMB file shares on many applications as well as media devices like the WDTV. With the WDTV, you'll get "Invalid login" trying to browse the file share until you uninstall Live Essentials. It's a deal-breaker for me. I stay away from Live Essentials now.
You can actually install Movie Maker alone and not get the Sign-In assistant. But if you install Live Sync for example, you will get it and you'll need to remove the whole Live Essentials package in order to get functioning SMB shares again.
It's a shame too because the Sign-In assistant means that I don't have to sign into Live enabled websites.
wk
July 22, 2010 at 5:14am
I just have one question, who think ribbon is an improvement? I use MS office at work, and desbite the great improvement in 2007 version, the most irritating thing is ribbons, what is wrong with menu bar in 2003 version, it was organized, and you can find whatever you want in an easy and fast way.
Ribbon is just more aesthetic and that is it.
and YES you can not call ribbon an improvement.
stradric
July 22, 2010 at 7:07am
The ribbon is not just for aesthetics. It improves efficiency. Many oft-performed actions will become 1-click operations rather than multiple clicks with the old menu bar. I find it very convenient in many situations.
Many people don't like the ribbon bar because they are slow to adapt to change. It took them a long time to get used to the menu and when they finally did, Microsoft improved it with the ribbon bar. But people don't see it as an improvement. They only see it as a step back to learning something new. But that's technology for you. It's always changing.
I agree with Microsoft on imposing the change. Had our government had the same amount of courage, we might actually be using the far superior metric system in the US.
