Since there is no new major update to the Windows OS coming up this year, Microsoft is hoping to keep it fresh with its latest update to the Windows Live Essentials Apps. This new version o f Live Apps will only work with Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

The Windows Live Apps are used for managing your photos and videos and keeping them in sync with various different services. The updates to Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Sync will go into beta in the coming months.

From what I’ve seen of the new apps so far, it appears to be somewhat similar to Google’s Picassa tool. The next version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery tool will add facial recognition abilities and improved editing tools for removing blemishes or scratches. Up until now Microsoft has been somewhat behind on this front with Picassa and iPhoto all having the ability to detect faces. It could only detected the presence of faces in shots, but wasn’t able to recognize who was in the picture.

The new face recognition features draw on the company’s research efforts as well as accessing  the user’s existing network of social contacts to figure out who might be in a photo.

Microsoft are also making it easier for your take group shots. You can take multiple pictures and use one person’s expression from one shot and another person’s face in another shot, and then thanks to this new technology you can stitch them all together to form one picture. The new software also allows photos that are uploaded and then tagged on Facebook to have those tags brought back into Photo Gallery.

In fact Microsoft are so confident in these new features that they are claiming that “Windows is better for photos than a Mac, hands down.”

The updates to the Windows Live Movie Maker include the ability to upload directly to Facebook, YouTube and import photo caption data from Photo Gallery, along with some new themes.

The new Windows Live Sync lets users share an unlimited amount of files in a peer-to-peer fashion among a number of Macs and PCs, but limits cloud storage to 2GB. However this means you can access your pictures and videos anywhere on the go.

Check out the video below and let us know what you think of it

Source:

Cnet