Windows Live Folders becomes Windows Live SkyDrive

Hot off the press : Windows Live Folders beta becomes Windows Live SkyDrive beta. And its a next release with improvements based on feedback and suggestions. And I am one of its beta tester :)

An upgraded look and feel — new sleeker interface.
"Also on SkyDrive" — easily get back to the SkyDrives you’ve recently visited.
Thumbnail images - A feature requested by many. But I think a little bit bigger thumbnail would be convenient.
Drag and drop your files - Drag and drop right onto SkyDrive. Multiple selection of files and just drag them, very Convenient.
While uploading , now you get a progress bar instead of bouncing ball game. Nice !
Obtained after installing ActiveX control in IE.
Embed your stuff anywhere — with just a few clicks, post your files and folders anywhere you can post html.

And above all SkyDrive introduced in two additional regions: UK and India.

Note for existing beta users: if you’ve sent or posted links using Windows Live Folders, you will need to update your links due to changes in URLs with this release.
So Hurry up, go sign up today!

Also check for the new, team blog site: http://skydriveteam.spaces.live.com.

Windows Live Folders beta to be expanded

As i had posted earlier about broadening of Windows Live Folders beta soon, so here's an opportunity for getting the beta and try your hands on this cool service. Those who were not able to get this beta and had signed up to be included in the waiting list will soon be able to lay their hands on WL Folders. So keep an eye on http://folders.live.com/which will be expanding its beta from today.

And may be we may see some more improvements, more new feature addition soon.

Update 02 Aug 07, 1:17 AM IST :- As of now Windows Live Folders is open and is for Limited Time only, so hurry up and sign up by clicking the Get Started button here.
Although Official blog says "We’re not quite ready to expand to additional markets but we’ll continue to grow in the future, so stay tuned!"
But still give it a try.

Demo of Windows Live Folders

Since Windows Live Folders is in managed beta and it was open only for limited time, for limited people, many of you might be very eager to know what this cool service is all about?
You might have already read my short review posted earlier.

And its going to be broadened as it develops. Already many of the suggestions being put by beta testers are being considered and new features being added. You can check for the updates at the official Windows Live Folders Blog, where your comments can also be given. While the actual site is Windows Live Folders beta.

And now a video is also available, courtesy channel 10, giving a demo of what Windows Live Folders is all about, explained by the Windows Live Folders team itself. Direct link to video.

Check out the cool video about the cool Windows Live Folders !!

Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery beta

Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery are now in limited managed betas, and as I received the invite, I was trying out these cool services.
I started with getting into Live Folders first, because the invite said there was limited availability for Windows Live Folders and sign up was available only for few hours on 27th June. Luckily I could sign up without any problem.

Windows Live Folders was already in the news , when it briefly popped up earlier in the Month of May. Its an online file storage service which provides 500MB of free online storage with 50MB individual upload file size limit and can be accessed from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal folders, shared folders and Public folders and can control the access to each folder.

And ones personal folders are protected with his Live id and the folders that are shared has to be accessed with their Live id who wants to access it.

Using Shared folders one can easily collaborate with coworkers, and we can decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read while others can add and delete files.

With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can't change it. Each folder and file has its own web address.

Overall its a nice service and will be fully utilised by its users as its very useful. And it may be provided with more features in future. Some of them which I may like to see are thumbnail view of uploaded picture files, ability to sync Live folders with local folders, integration with Windows desktop and also facility to save Office documents directly to Live folders, so an addon for office for implementing this feature can be provided.

Now coming to the next cool thing, Windows Live Photo Gallery which users of Vista may already be familiar with, is provided with some more features. WL PhotoGallery beta can also be installed on Windows XP SP2.

Also image editing features are vastly improved with features like Panoramic stitch, histogram. There's also improved tagging and organising. One can publish the Photos directly to Windows Live Spaces.


Also the Photo Import tool has been improved a lot, which now groups all photos taken from digital camera by date and time. This is very convenient.

After installing on XP machine, one can see that Movie maker integration as seen in Photo Gallery installed on Vista is not present, so Make movie option is not present for the XP version.

The option of "Create Panoramic Stitch..." provided which as the name suggests stitches overlapping photos to create a single stitched photo. Useful for creating long panoramic view such as city's skyline which can not be captured in single shot. And this option many of you using Digital cameras might have come across in the Software provided with the cameras. Anyway when I tried this option from Photo gallery, it did an amazingly near perfect job creating a stitched photo. This can also be used for creating sort of 360 deg. view of a Hall/room with some effort. So a very nice addition.

So I could say the new Windows Live Photo gallery provides lots of options for managing and fixing your Photos and options which you may not find in basic image editor. One can expect some more refinement of features in the future.