Photos for Windows 8 is the final app to be previewed by Microsoft in its Building Windows 8 blog, and Microsoft wants all of our photos to be in one place.
Ever had that problem of scattering photos across devices? That won’t be a problem with Photos in Windows 8.
Microsoft says Photos is immediately help by the fact that users can connect Facebook or Flickr accounts with their Windows Live ID, which means all of your photos will be imported into Photos. Users can also send pictures from their phone to SkyDrive, the cloud storage directly integrated into Windows 8.
It sounds like photos get uploaded as soon as you take them, which sounds pretty great. Upload photos to Facebook is still painfully slow, partly because you can only upload individually and partly because the website is so slow to load content.
Photos are optimized for landscape just like Windows 8, which can be annoying when photos have black bars above and below. There’s also what Microsoft calls a storyline view, which allows multiple photos to be viewed together at once by pinching to zoom out and and less by zooming in. It sounds like it’s designed around photos taken from a single event. It also shows the photos in the natural orientation.
There’s naturally a slideshow feature that automatically goes through photos. The Device charms on the Charms bar can be used to play a slideshow on a connected TV or Windows 8 Play To devices or videos.
Lost Photos? Download SkyDrive
For PCs that don’t have SkyDrive installed, downloading the SkyDrive desktop app will show up the photos on Windows 8 devices. It doesn’t sound like photos have to be download: they just appear.
There’s also the ability to Import photos; plugging a device in show all of the photos, and users select what they want to import. In typical Metor style, the photos are presented in a grid layout with a thumbnail of the image. The result is that it’s pretty easy to see content, and not just an arbitrary name of a photo that means nothing after the fact. Photos can also be organized after, as they can be sorted by date. Opening the Photos app also shows a background photo, and edgeless photos at the bottom.
