I am an unabashed fan of Windows Live Writer; an offline blog editor for bloggers, and have been pretty much one since I first started using back when it was just a beta project at Microsoft. I still get a kick out of it when people who are amazed that such a great product could emanate from the Beast of Redmond.
While things like its close integration with Wordpress is nice and its extensibility through plugins make it easy to add features to there is one addition to this newest release (you can get it here) that really impressed me. With this release you can now add a collection of photos; or graphics, in a gallery layout; of which there are five different styles available.
The only drawback is that it requires you to have a Windows Live Profile – which if you have a Hotmail email address or one of the rarer Live.com email address’ then you have filled that requirement. This is because the gallery option in WLW makes use of Windows Skydrive for storing and serving up your photos. I’m sure that there will be some who will bitch about this but I really don’t care – I think this is a really great addition to the application.
The default display of the gallery in your post is the Spread layout
The four remaining styles are Grid Right, Grid Left, Scatter and finally the Flyout style
This might only be a small feature that most bloggers might not need but I think that it shows that the WLW team are always trying to find ways to help bloggers make their jobs easier; and help us make our posts more interesting for our readers.
I might not find much use for the Picture Gallery option here on WinExtra but I definitely can see using it on my other blog braincell soup. I should also say that Windows Live Writer is one of those few programs that I use all the time that I actually look forward to new releases – they never fail to surprise.
So a big thank you to the WLW team and I wish them ; and their families, a very Merry Christmas.
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