Windows Live Essentials (wave 4) beta was just released today and I'm trying Photo Gallery first. The potential looks very good and many features work well. There are some performance issues which I expect will be worked out before final release.
The feature I'm most excited about is Photo Tagging - allowing you to manually or automatically (based on facial recognition) tag people in photos. The manual tagging works very well and quickly; when a photo is selected, the program finds any faces, and asks "Who is this?" for each. A pull-down list will show anyone you've previously tagged, and your list of contacts, and allowing you to add new people. It takes about two or three seconds to tag someone from your list in a new photo.
The automatic tagging hasn't worked so well yet. I'm not sure if it just needs more information - more time to correllate all the facial data - but for my photos, it only seems to identify a very limited few photos for each person. IOW, although I may have hundreds of photos of someone, it only finds and offers to tag two or three at a time.
I clicked the "Batch People Tag" button, which I assumed would look through ALL my photos, recognize faces in each one, and then offer me the choices of how (or who?) to tag. Unfortunately, this just caused the program to scan for "tag suggestions" endlessly; I got the spinning blue "wait tire" (as in, "I'm tired of waiting) for well over an hour before I gave up on it. I couldn't seem to get it to scan a subset of photos either... So, that's perfomance issue #1.
Performance issue #2 is more inexplicable. This occurred when I plugged in my camera and tried to use Photo Gallery to import photos for the first time, instead of using the Windows 7 import wizard as usual. It took at least 10 times longer to import the photos and video. That's a major failure, but at least I can work around it by using the built-in import, or just drag and drop.
Still, I'm so very impressed with just this one program of the WLE suite, I can't wait to try the other features like AutoMovie, and other programs, like the new Sync (combining the former Mesh Beta with Live Sync, I understand).
The bits are here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta
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