Windows Live Photo Gallery (beta)

The nastiest part of the whole Windows Live Wave 4 Beta experience so far has been concentrated on the installer - though not all Microsoft's fault, I did have some dodgy settings in my Internet Options.

Today, I flicked open the new Windows Live Photo Gallery, and this is a really nice application.

THE GOOD

1. Automatically detected iPhone and offer to import pictures
   
   
2. Import offers to just grab everything, or group (and mass-tag) pictures based on the time they were taken.  Aka "afternoon trip", "evening dinner @ rocks"
   
   
3. Default view sorted pictures by Month
4. Automatically detected the picture orientation and rotated them around.  Unlike…  a certain other company's software.  http://johnliu.net/blog/2010/4/15/apple-iphone-drivers-are-pos.html
   
   
   iPhone crap drivers.
   
   
   Windows Live Photo Gallery import (automatically fixed orientation)
5. Lovely Ribbons interface

THE AWESOME

1. Panoramic photo stitching!
   
   Long Zheng has a much better comparison
   
2. Mass tagging, mass image adjustments
3. Mass upload to Skydrive, Flickr or Facebook
4. Extensible (this will make it even more awesome)