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

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Ludwig

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 then 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. The 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 arrangement, 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. In 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!

Springtime in the South

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

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Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, Windows Live, Live Writer, Photos, SkyDrive, albums, link to album, insert album

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Live Writer,Photos,SkyDrive,albums,link to album,insert album,Windows Live Writer

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

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Ludwig

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.

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: SkyDrive,Windows Live,Photos,Documents

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, how-to, SkyDrive, Documents, Photos

How can I see my SkyDrive photos in Windows Explorer?

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Ludwig

You Windows Live SkyDrive photos are stored “in the cloud” on Microsoft servers. Normally you access them through a browser like Internet Explorer.

It is possible to map a SkyDrive album to a drive letter in Windows Explorer. Then you can see what photos you have stored in that album.

NOTE: This method works in Windows 7. Windows Vista also supports mapping with this procedure, other operating system do not, sorry.

Here is how:

Obtain your Windows Live account “cid” number. Once you have that you may want to save it in a file for future use.

Sign in to you Windows Live account by going to home.live.com.
Click on profile underneath your name in the upper right.

The address in the browser address window contains your “cid” number. It is the number following “cid-“ up to the next period (“.”) as shown highlighted in this example:

Of course, the number will be your own unique number, not mine as shown here.

Copy this number for later use.
Get the name of the SkyDrive album that you wish to map.

Next proceed on your computer.

Click Start – Computer. Windows Explorer open showing your drives.
On the menu bar click Map network drive.

A “Map network drive” dialog opens.

Select the drive letter you wish to use. By default the selection is the highest drive letter available, normally Z:.
In the Folders box enter this text (without the quotes) “\\docs.live.net@SSL\” ,followed by your cid number, followed by a back-slash, followed by the album name.

Click Finish.

You will see a “Map Network Drive” dialog. It may take a while for this process to complete.

When the “Windows Security” dialog opens enter your Windows Live ID – the complete email address and your password.

After another delay a new Windows Explorer window opens showing your SkyDrive album (as illustrated here).

You can see thumbnails of your photos and you can see the properties of a selected photo in the properties pane.

Can you use this mapped folder like any other? Alas, at the present time (October 2010) when you drag a photo to this folder it seems to work at first. Then you get an error message.

The error message may say that the file is too large, regardless of how small it actually may be. Maybe soon Microsoft will enable the functionality that is so close to reality.

For now you will have to settle for just seeing your photos in the album. Use Windows Live Photo Gallery to upload photos to the album (see: How do I upload photos to SkyDrive using Windows Live Photo Gallery?) or upload from the SkyDrive side (see: How do I upload photos to SkyDrive?)

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,SkyDrive,Photos,albums,map drive,Windows Explorer,Photo Gallery

How do I upload photos to my SkyDrive?

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Ludwig

There are several ways to copy pictures to Windows Live SkyDrive. They can be “pushed” up using Windows Live Photo Gallery (see: How do I upload photos to SkyDrive using Windows Live Photo Gallery?) or they can be “pulled” up form SkyDrive. This second method is the topic of this post.

Here is a step-by-step procedure:

Sign in to your Windows Live account. Internet Explorer likely will remember you and sign you in when you go to home.live.com.
On your Windows Live home page click on Photos in the menu bar at the top.

Click on the album where you want to add photos. If the album does not show, click View all albums in the nav bar on the left.
Click Add photos on the menu bar.
The “Add photos” page provides for two ways to copy photos to the album. You can drag photos from a Windows Explorer windows, however, this method is not available on all browsers. The other way is to click “select photos from your computer”.

An “Open” dialog window opens. This is actually Windows Explorer. It likely will open to a document folder, so maneuver to the correct folder where the photos are.
Select the photos to upload in the normal way – click the thumbnail, hold down the Ctrl key to select more. The other ways work just fine.
Click Open (lower right).
The thumbnails will start to appear on the SkyDrive page. The default size of the photos to be uploaded is “Large (1600 px)”. If you wish the photos to be scaled to another size, or to maintain their original size, select the option by clicking the size button.
Click Continue (it will be unavailable until the “Open “task is completed.