Microsoft gets a better answer to Flickr
<br />Microsoft's improved photo-hosting site offers slide shows, but images don't fill the screen.(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)<br /><br />For a company that's trying to take on the online might of Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has had a decidedly inferior photo-sharing site. Now that's changing, though.<br /><br />As part of an overhaul of its online properties, the company announced a number of improvements to its Windows Live Photos site.<br /><br />Among the new features: <br /><br />• 25GB of storage space and no more 500-shots-per-month limit on uploads.<br /><br />• A what's new feed to show what photos your contacts are adding, part of the social side of Windows Live.<br /><br />• A new slide show view.<br /><br />• Better permissions for controlling how photos are shared.<br /><br />I found the new site workable but still imperfect.<br /><br />The photos.live.com site bears a strong resemblance to Yahoo's Flickr.(Credit: Microsoft/CNET News)<br /><br />The most glaring ugliness to me was that the slide show is limited to small versions of the images. That's no problem on an 800x600-pixel screen, but even Flickr, which still hasn't figured out how to dynamically scale images on its regular photo pages, has full-screen slide shows.<br /><br />Another hitch was that it's apparently impossible to rename your photos. So pick a file name you like before you upload. And you can't change the order of photos shown unless you want to diddle with the photos' "date taken" metadata, which sounds like a bad idea for any number of reasons.<br /><br />As a fan of keyboard controls, though, I do like the fact that I can use the arrow keys to cycle through photos in an album, though it works only intermittently.<br /><br /> <br />
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