Nick Hodge went through the effort to record a screencast video of using the latest Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta to publish to Yahoo!'s flickr: Flickr, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Tags! | The Geek Stories | Channel 10 .

If a picture's worth a thousand-words, a video is worth... lots more? Nick also demonstrates using the photo-stitching feature to merge together a series of shots. This, along with grouped photo-acquisition and the recent flickr addition, has been a very popular feature.

Thanks, Nick!

Early reactions to the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta 2.2 release:

• Techmeme Windows Live Photo Gallery And Flickr (ScottIsAFool-LiveSide)
• Jeff Sandquist - Microsoft Evangelist - Windows Live Photo Gallery Now Supports Flickr
• Windows Live Photo Gallery includes Flickr!  Larry Larsen  Channel 10
• It’s Official! Windows Live Photo Gallery now supports Flickr! » PALERMITI.ORG
• More Ways to Upload « Flickr Blog
• publish-your-photos-to-flickr-with-windows-live-photo-gallery
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Address Web 2.0 and the Future of the Internet Steve Ballmer to p
• Windows Live Photo Gallery And Flickr - LiveSide - News blog

As Michael points out in the PIX blog posting, we've also made some important changes that will be more apparent in the final release:

• As of Beta 2.2, we do not require XP users to be running Windows Desktop Search. For right now, you'll have to install it if you don't already have WLPG, get the Beta 2.2 updated, and then remove WDS if you don't want it. For the final release you won't have to go through this cha-cha-cha.
• We ask to ensure you want us to be associated with your graphic files and be the application opening them.

A lot of clarity came about thanks to early beta users blogging their impressions and using the Microsoft Connect customer site. We had the opportunity to turn around the changes and fixes time allowed.

I love Long's post today: The future of Windows Photo Gallery - istartedsomething .

One, he has some nice things to say about the team I joined earlier in the year, Windows Live Photo Gallery, part of the Digital Memories Team in Windows Live:

Before today, Photo Gallery satisfied most of my post-processing needs through the basic but effective adjustment tools. All that was missing was the link between editing my photos and archiving and sharing the photos on Flickr. However in the latest Live Photo Gallery update delivered just today, Flickr uploading has been integrated right into the application so it’s literally become the tool in my workflow.

And then... what does Long do but point-out we are hiring! Yes! We are! And once again, some of those words in the job req look awfully familiar (gazing down at my keyboard). I didn't incorporate "intuitive cinch" this time, though.

Here is a query I hope that works for you to see all of the DMX job openings.

If you're interested, please go to a job req and post your resume directly there. That's the best way to get you directly hooked up with our team.

On a side note, I'm really excited to have worked with the highly motivated individuals who stepped up and delivered flickr integration in the Windows Live Photo Gallery. I'm grateful, too, to all the early Beta users who - by blogging and requesting flickr be added - validated that this was going to be a great feature to add. And the Yahoo! flickr team? They rock.

Everything just clicked together.

This is just nothing short of exciting fun for me: Virtual Earth / Live Maps: Live Search Maps v2 is out! Gemini Launches.

I immediately launched my FolderShare at work to grab some GPX files off of my home computer and load them into some new collections off of maps.live.com - nice! I don't have to write JavaScript to turn GPX into polylines now! Happy days, happy days.

And the other features are great. I can now use Birds Eye view to took at my neighborhood from four different angles. If I want, I can go to our King County web site and load up their parcel viewer to create my own GPX description of my neighboring parcels and see how things look from above from all sorts of angles.

Funtastic!

Ooo, ooo, there goes a bunch of hours now.

And there's a 3D modeler in there, too? Ooo!

A very nice, end-to-end investigation by Mark regarding a crash, the reason the crash occurred, and the culprit code behind the crash: Mark's Blog : The Case of the Frozen Clock Gadget .

An interesting example of what's in a photo's content that enables you to fix, demonstrated via Windows Live Photo Gallery: eidos | High Dynamic Range Editing.

...I'll get something like this: myvu: Award-winning video eyewear for virtual big screen viewing: Product Overview .

If I was on the plane a lot (or a train / bus everyday) I'd get one now.

For me, the end-to-end scenario would be for my phone to be able to output a large-screen image into this device and then I'd be able to view my calendar, email, web browse, watch videos, etc, and not be restricted by the functional screen that comes with the phone. I don't want that little screen outputting to the visor; I want a much bigger resolution in a secondary screen for the video out.

If reviewing photos on my camera was a lot faster, it would also be nice to triage pictures by just whipping on the visor and going through the snaps of the day, discarding what wasn't needed.

And I'm sure there are plenty of amazing other things that can be done.

One of these days.

For those moments where you just have to go into Bellevue: Bellevue Real-Time Traffic Map .

Nice. For some reason, I always seem to have an urge to hit Bellevue Square during some of the absolute worse times of the year.

I'll have to visit this later this evening to see how it's doing tracking rush-hour traffic. One magical day, stuff like this will feed proactively to your navigation system.