The rapid pace of innovation and competition among camera manufacturers has put increasingly impressive technologies into the hands of ever more people. The number of megapixels in consumer-level cameras has gone up, and new features in cameras and software like Windows Live Photo Gallery make it even easier to do creative things like making panoramas with your photos.

In the past, if you tried to upload your beautiful new panoramas to Windows Live Photos in their original size, you couldn’t view them right on the site. Today we’re rolling out a new release of Photos that bumps our limit on photo size up—way up. You are now able to get thumbnails and easily viewable versions of photos all the way up to 25 megapixels – more than enough to accommodate even this panorama:

 
Click for full-size image 

We’ve also taken a magnifying glass to the image quality of photos—in all their various sizes—throughout the site. We wanted to add more “wow” to your pictures, and we think our changes make everything from thumbnails to images viewed in the slideshow look noticeably better.

We’re super excited about those improvements, but we know that if moving through a photo album takes forever, it may not matter how beautiful your photos are. We’ve also put a lot of work into making photo albums faster to browse through—you no longer have to wait for the entire page to refresh when you move between photos. Plus, you can browse through your photos using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. You can try it out in this album:

 

To try out these new, cool features go to Windows Live Photos.

We hope all of these improvements make it even easier and more fun for you to tell your stories and share the exciting moments of your life with your family and friends!

– The Windows Live Photos team

Cool features

September 10, 2009

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