How I Upload Photos to Facebook

I just have to say, I am loving Windows 7 RC. One of things I like that is an extended part of Windows 7 is the Windows Live Essentials. On a fresh install of Windows 7, go into the search bar and type in “Windows Live Essentials” or you can search for it using your favorite search engine to get to the download portal.

There are a few things included in the suite but what I want to talk about today is the Windows Live Photo Gallery. It’s quite similar to Vista’s Photo Gallery but much, much better. You can either build your own plugins or download ones that have been built by others. I’ll be talking about one in particular, the Live Upload to Facebook Plugin.

Scenario is this: after importing my pictures into my machine, I want to review them before uploading them to Facebook (or flickr or whatever service you want). Think of it as quality control.

The Facebook upload control makes it easy to upload photos if you already know which photos you want. My problem is that, I import my photos into folders based on events. And rarely do I want to upload all the photos I’ve taken of an event up into facebook, or flicker.

What I do is use Windows Live Photo Gallery to quickly view and rate my photos 5 stars for the ones I want to upload to Facebook. (or i could do something like, 3 for facebook, 5 for flickr, etc.)

Another thing the software does is (1) identify faces in the photos and (2) allow you to tag people from your messenger list (or specify the name of someone who’s not)

I can then go back to the gallery:

And either sort:

or filter the photos in a specific folder:

And now, since I have the Live Uploader plugin installed I can easily select and publish the photos into facebook:

I’m prompted to select the account I want to use:

I can then either create a new album, or select an existing album to publish the pictures to. Straight from the software, you can also control permissions for the album