Photographers who shot their photos in RAW format could not really make use of Windows Live’s Photo Gallery until now, as it did not support RAW formats.

This changes today with the release of the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack for Windows Vista and Windows 7. The independent download adds support for more than 120 DSLR cameras to Photo Gallery, Windows Explorer and other programs that use Windows Imaging Codecs (WIC).

Installation of the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack should be a breeze. Users only need to make sure that they install the right version for their operating system. The camera codec pack is offered for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.

The download page over at Microsoft’s Download Center lists the supported camera models. I have taken the liberty to quote the camera models below:

• Canon: EOS 1000D (EOS Kiss F in Japan and the EOS Rebel XS in North America), EOS 10D, EOS 1D Mk2, EOS 1D Mk3, EOS 1D Mk4, EOS 1D Mk2 N, EOS 1Ds Mk2, EOS 1Ds Mk3, EOS 20D, EOS 300D (the Kiss Digital in Japan and the Digital Rebel in North America) , EOS 30D, EOS 350D (the Canon EOS Kiss Digital N in Japan and EOS Digital Rebel XT in North America), EOS 400D (the Kiss Digital X in Japan and the Digital Rebel XTi in North America), EOS 40D, EOS 450D (EOS Kiss X2 in Japan and the EOS Rebel XSi in North America), EOS 500D (EOS Kiss X3 in Japan and the EOS Rebel T1i in North America), EOS 550D (EOS Kiss X4 in Japan, and as the EOS Rebel T2i in North America), EOS 50D, EOS 5D, EOS 5D Mk2, EOS 7D, EOS D30, EOS D60, G2, G3, G5, G6, G9, G10, G11, Pro1, S90
• Nikon: D100, D1H, D200, D2H, D2Hs, D2X, D2Xs, D3, D3s, D300, D3000, D300s, D3X, D40, D40x, D50, D5000, D60, D70, D700, D70s, D80, D90, P6000
• Sony: A100, A200, A230, A300, A330, A350, A380, A700, A850, A900, DSC-R1
• Olympus: C7070, C8080, E1, E10, E20, E3, E30, E300, E330, E400, E410, E420, E450, E500, E510, E520, E620, EP1
• Pentax (PEF formats only): K100D, K100D Super, K10D, K110D, K200D, K20D, K7, K-x, *ist D, *ist DL, *ist DS
• Leica: Digilux 3, D-LUX4, M8, M9
• Minolta: DiMage A1, DiMage A2, Maxxum 7D (Dynax 7D in Europe, α-7 Digital in Japan)
• Epson: RD1
• Panasonic: G1, GH1, GF1, LX3

Windows Live Photo Gallery supports viewing and editing of RAW image formats once the codec pack has been installed on the system. Photo Gallery will automatically create a copy of the RAW images in JPEG or JPEG-XR format which can then be edited and worked with by the user.

Windows users can now also preview the supported RAW image formats under Windows Explorer and other programs that make use of WIC.

Microsoft has already announced that they are working on adding support for missing and new camera models. (via)

Element Photo Gallery is a desktop application for Windows that is not as heavyweight as Picasa or Windows live Photo Gallery. The 2 Megabyte program can manage multiple albums on the system easily.

New photos are loaded by selecting a folder or photos directly. Import works pretty much automated from that point on. Users with photos in many different folders will notice that an option to crawl subfolders is missing during import, each folder has to be selected separately.

element photo gallery

Photos are scanned and displayed as thumbnails in the program interface. A double-click opens a larger view of the selected photo, with options to change or edit the title, time taken or description. The same menu offers basic photo editing options like adjusting the colors, size or dimensions of the photo. And the notorious red eye removal is available as well.

photo editing

The photo preview window offers additional options to zoom in and out of the current photo, rotate it or navigate to the next or previous photo in the photo album.

On the publishing side, there are options to burn photo albums to CD or DVD, post images to Flickr or Facebook, email them to other users, create a basic HTML web gallery or print them on a local printer.

Finally, there are options to search the photo collection and to view a slideshow of the photos in the selected album.

Element Photo Gallery is a lightweight photo management software for the Windows operating system. It offers a lot that users want to see, without going overboard with the feature set.

It is probably best suited for medium sized photo collections. The program can be downloaded directly from the developer website over at Element Software. The program requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 installed.

The Liveside blog discovered all download links prior to the official announcement by Microsoft, which is expected to hit the official website later today.

Below are the web and full download links for all supported languages of the beta. As you can see, seven languages next to English are available: French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

• English: Web – Full
• French: Web – Full
• German: Web – Full
• Dutch: Web – Full
• Portuguese (Brazilian): Web – Full
• Spanish: Web – Full
• Japanese: Web – Full
• Chinese (Simplified): Web – Full

The full installer comes at a size of about 151 Megabytes, the web installer is considerably smaller, but requires an Internet connection during setup to download additional program packages.

So what’s new in the new beta version of Windows Live Essentials?

This new version of the suite, incorporates new icons, new features, many bugs fixed since version Beta releases and what more important… The incorporation Windows Live Language Setting with all language packs (MUI) & (LIP) for example Catalan and Euskera for Spanish version.
This program brings new features like the ability to change languages or install (automatically for the web) the additional languages.

Additional information will become available once Microsoft announces the new beta version official on their Windows Live blog.

Update: The post is live, and it contains lots of information about the Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh:

Performance and quality of service improvements

A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
More efficient video chat – Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
Better facial recognition – Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
Larger movie uploads – Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
Higher bit-rate movies – Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
Better spell-checking – Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
Better integration with Office – Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
Faster web filtering – Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

Facebook chat in Messenger

Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.

New Facebook chat integration

Connect to Facebook and Windows Live

Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery

One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.

Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker

With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.

In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.

Several of the improvements and new features improve the user experience a lot. Facebook chat integration will appeal to a lot of users, the new option to upload movies and photos to Flickr is plain awesome, the improvements in movie maker that now supports higher quality content, coupled with the increase in movie resolutions that can be uploaded to SkyDrive show that Microosft is on the right way.

We suggest to download the Windows Live Essentials Full installer which offers several advantages including the possibility to distribute it to several computer systems without having to download the program packages over and over again.

Have you tried the second beta of Windows Live Essentials? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Update: The beta releases are outdated and have been removed. You can download the latest Windows Live Essentials release from the official website now.

Most users prefer an automatic solution where they only have to select the images that they want to include. The whole coding would be done by the application which has the advantage that it’s faster and more convenient.

Moba Photo provides such a solution for the photo enthusiast. The photo software provides four functions: Batch photo resizing, batch picture editing, batch picture renamer and finally the digital gallery creator. The first three are useful for editing the photos before the gallery is created. Each of the three image manipulation sections provides a user friendly interface.

The image resizer for instance provides four predefined formats for printing, wallpapers, online publishing and CD / DVD publishing next to the option to select custom sizes for the photos.

The image gallery provides a similar easy to use interface. The user needs to pick the images that he wants to add to the gallery. That’s the bare minimum and sufficient to create the gallery. He can change a few optional parameters like page title, include picture names or to provide a download all pictures link. The new gallery can be uploaded right from the application to a ftp server.

A click on an image opens the image in front of the other images on the same website. It looks pretty good for a free gallery, don’t you think ?