Submission details
Live Photo Gallery: Backup original photos to a sub folder in the original directory.
When making changes to a photo in Windows Live Photo Gallery the original photo gets backed up in the users profile automatically without asking to save. This is a good method if only one person accesses the photo store and backs up their whole computer. However this becomes a problem in several in scenarios.
1. A user has a folder share with all the photos. Once someone modifies a photo( cropping, black and white, sepia, etc) the original photo gets stored in that persons profile. The original photo is no longer available to others that access that photo share.
2. A user wants to back up his photo folder and simply copies the folder onto a DVD. The original photo doesn't get backed up.
Allowing users to at least have the option to change where the backup of the original photos are stored would solve this problem.
Google's Picasa does this in a much more elegant way. It saves the original photo in a sub folder called "original" in the original directory. This way uses can undo any changes done by anyone else.
Keeping the fidelity and accessibility of the original photo should be of utmost importance in Windows Live Photo Gallery.
High
High
Not fixed
Discussion (2 comments)
its a must!
My family's photo albums are stored on a central server and I would like to keep it that way. If my mother crops and saves a photograph, the original is taken off the server and the "Revert to original" option is only available on her account on the computer she used. With the effort it would take me to retrieve the originals of all the pictures edited by everyone on every computer here, those originals are as good as lost. :(
An alternative may be to use the Volume Shadow Copy service (i.e. Previous Versions) to keep track of originals, although I imagine that the originals would be lost if you were to copy your photo album to a different computer.
Ideally, I think that WLPG should make hidden folders to store the originals in the folder they reside. If I need to move my photo gallery or switch to a different photo organizer, I'd rather just copy the files instead of search for a proper Import/Export function in the application.
This Microsoft Knowledgebase article specifies where originals are currently saved.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944370
mikefarinha wrote on March 17, 2009, 2:46pm
Changed title from [Live Photo: Backup original photos to a sub folder in the original directory.] to [Live Photo Gallery: Backup original photos to a sub folder in the original directory.].