You can now try out a test version of Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft's free photo gallery, movie making and instant messaging software.
Microsoft made beta versions available Thursday. The software includes Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Messenger, Mail and Writer. The software is installed on a PC but connects to free Web storage on SkyDrive. The software is also integrated with the Web so it can upload text, photos and video to Facebook, Flickr, Wordpress and Facebook.
The new versions of the software have more photo editing and video features, such as the ability to create panoramas by pasting together several photos, and to retouch photos. It also can automatically recognize and tag faces in photos, which could be either convenient for tagging or creepy for privacy reasons.
To test the new Windows Live Wave 4 Essentials applications for yourself, you can
download them from Windows Live Preview. Microsoft isn't sharing target dates for the software's final release, only saying that it "will become final when ready for release."
To read more about it, here is the
company blog item about the Windows Live beta.
