Where are the thumbnails stored for a post with a SkyDrive album?

Windows Live Writer has an insert option for adding a SkyDrive album to a post. When Add online album is selected, an “Insert Photo Album” dialog opens. It may ask for a sign in before showing all the albums on your SkyDrive. Click an album icon and thenimage click Insert to get the process started. Live Writer downloads the pictures from the album in order to create the graphics. An example of a SkyDrive album is shown at the end of this post.

Live Writer creates a folder for the downloaded images and newly created thumbnails on your boot drive under Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Temp\WindowsLiveWriter-xxxx. imageThe album will be shown by a collection of thumbnails, the album title, and a couple of hyperlinks. A new “Photo Album Tools” Ribbon tab is available whenever the album art is selected. The most useful and interesting tools are in the Album styles section of the tab: A half dozen layout styles are shown. The first, default, layout, shows the thumbnails the same way as pictures are shown in a photo email. Two other layouts show the pictures in a flat imagearrangement, the remaining three show randomly oriented little pictures. The thumbnails can be rearranged with the “Shuffle photos” tool. Just click on this command and observe the new arrangement. Continue until you are happy with the presentation. When the post is published to your blog, the created display pictures are uploaded to the blog image store. imageIn this case, this being a WordPress.com blog, the images wind up online in the blog’s Media Library. If one of the random display options is selected this will be one image of the entire arrangement. For the other three layouts, Squares, Grid right, and Grid left, the individual thumbnails are uploaded to the blog media library.

As you would expect, Windows Live Writer does a fine job of cleaning up after itself. In the case of this post, the temporary store contained over 3 GB of material. Once the post has been published this folder is emptied and removed.

Now, aren’t you glad you asked? This allowed me to tell you a little about how Windows Live Writer offers another really nice feature and does a great job of managing it.

Here at last is the demo album. Enjoy!

 

 

How do I upload a folder to SkyDrive?

UPDATE 5 June 2012: SkyDrive has been greatly improved. The SkyDrive app for the desktop now allows using SkyDrive just like any other folder on your computer. See How do I install SkyDrive in Windows Explorer?

 

Windows Live provides users with a large online storage area, this area is normally used for photo albums and for document storage. From SkyDrive the “Add files” option does not permit uploading folders. Folders can be uploaded by mapping a SkyDrive folder as a network drive so it can be shown in Windows Explorer.

How to map a folder is described in: How can I see my SkyDrive photos in Windows Explorer? The procedure for a document folder is the same as for an album. Keep in mind that the entire SkyDrive cannot be mapped, it has to be an individual folder.

Once mapped, the folder can be used, almost!, like any other folder on the computer.

A folder with contents, including other folders, can be copied to the SkyDrive folder by just dragging as illustrated here (or the Ctrl+CCtrl+V keyboard shortcuts can be used).

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The selected folder will be copied to the SkyDrive folder – since this is an Internet upload, the time will depend on the connection speed.

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Once the folder is uploaded it is accessible in Windows Explorer. It is, of course, also accessible from SkyDrive. Below is a view of the newly uploaded folder in SkyDrive by the process illustrated above. Is all the contents is there?

That depends! Windows Live and SkyDrive are in a state of flux at the time of this writing (November 2010).

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The procedure described here currently works only for Office documents and plain text documents (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, TXT). If files of another type were in the uploaded folder those files will not make it to SkyDrive at this time!

The Office documents can be inspected or edited online using Web Apps. Just click on the document title and the appropriate Web App is launched.

 

 

What is the difference between Office, Photos, and SkyDrive?

When signed in to Windows Live, the menu bar at the top provides access to Hotmail and Messenger and to the user’s SkyDrive. The individual commands provide access to the documents or photos portion.

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Each of the commands also provides a drop-down menu to select the specific item or task desired. Clicking on the “Windows Live” title also presents a menu. The menus are shown here.

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Under the Office command the documents and document folders can be reached. From Photos the albums can be displayed. When SkyDrive is clicked (left menu) all of the items on the SkyDrive are shown.

The different option just provide for quick access to the items of interest, there is no other difference.