03 april
A picture is worth a thousand words
And we want to make it easy for our customers to share those pictures. You’ll discover that with Mail Desktop Beta (Windows Live Mail Desktop) sharing pictures is super easy.
The common situation now? (at least for me 
)
I take a TON of pictures. Don’t you? Digital cameras make it almost too easy to take 100, 200, sometimes 500 pictures in just a few days. Now, I am not suggesting that you should share all of those; I am sure some of those should be kept private ;). But you always have at least a handful that you want to send to your friends and family. Right now it is a BIG pain.
- First I have to decide how many pictures I *can* send (note: not should but can send—2 very different things) because some mail applications have a low, low, low limit on attachments (seriously? Do I really have to choose between my 10 pictures of the most beautiful sunset ever?...right now YES)
- Second, I feel bad for my friends and family who’ll receive the pictures. How much fun is it to go through each one, double-click to view, close, repeat.
- There is no way for me to add any funny captions—how am I expected to explain why I have a sleeping mask on my mouth?
- If I don’t go with the attachment option, then I do snapfish or ofoto or another online service—also a big pain for those who aren’t members of snapfish. After all, why should my friends become members of *my* club just to look at some pictures?
How are we going to make it better?
We are (re)introducing Photo E-mail—a super duper easy way to share photos (for those of you who use MSN Premium client this will be very familiar).
As soon as you insert a few pictures they show up in the message with an easy way to add some (funny) captions. We’ve also decided to give you a few fun and productive tools to make your pictures truly yours:
- you’ll be able to add some borders
- change pictures to black and white
- change background color
- and even auto-correct.
When designing this we debated a lot of what we should offer and decided to start with these tools until we hear more user feedback. We don’t ever want to be a full photo editing tool, but we do want to make things easier for our customers (Thank you Heather for making the tough calls; Heather was the original PM on the feature). So let us know what you think!
On sending these pictures, the photos will be uploaded to our servers and smaller versions will be placed inside the message (Thank you Dare, Richard, and Jura from the storage team on making this happen!). This will make sure that your friends and family don’t get huge messages that fill out their inboxes. In fact, this is what they’ll see:
If your friends want to view bigger versions of the photos, all they have to do is hit “Play slideshow”. This is where are our friends from the Spaces team come in. They’ve created an awesome viewer for your friends and family to enjoy your pictures (Thank you DeEtte, Greg, and James).
Phew…that’s about it. The last thing to say is that we want to hear from you. What else do you do with photos? How do you share them now? What can we do to make it easier and more fun for you to share photos?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Vlada/Heather (“PM”), Azmy/Mark (“Dev”), Lei (“Test”), Jill/Mike (“Usability”), Eddie/Gannon (“Design”), James/Paul/Antonia (“User Assistance”), and Liying/Laurence (“Intl”)
-Vlada Breiburg
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