Microsoft’s Live Essentials pack to help Windows versus Mac

6th June, 2010 by adina
Tags: , , ,

Microsoft has recently claimed the superiority of its media applications by means of its upgraded Windows Live Essentials pack. This one is mainly focused on Photo Gallery and is said to have some advantages compared to iPhoto. Among them, users can build composite images using the best elements of similar images, Facebook integration is tighter with both uploads, the possibility of importing tags from photographic material that is already uploaded to the network. New features like batch editing and an Office-like ribbon interface are new.

These advantages were sufficient for Brian Hall, Microsoft’s general manager, to declare that Windows is now better than Mac when it comes to photos.

However, many features are designed to reach Apple’s high performance related to photo management applications and they were already provided by iPhoto ’09 or earlier versions. Face recognition, Microsoft’s primary feature, is similar to Faces. Other features like retouching, auto adjust, animated slideshows at full screen dimensions, powerful sorting criteria like person or rating, were already present in Mac’s product.

It is also possible now to automatically create a slideshow by using photos through the Movie Maker, similar to the export from iPhoto to iMovie. The Live Sync, which was rechristened, provides access to 2GB of online storage as well as folder sharing on the local network between appropriately equipped Windows PCs and Macs.

The launching date of the final version of Microsoft’s Live Essentials is set sometime later this year, but a more extensive beta test of the product is scheduled in a few weeks.


  • Share

 

Readers Comments