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What is LiveUpload to Facebook?

LiveUpload to Facebook is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their photos to Facebook. The plug-in takes advantage of the new people tagging feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta to persist your people tags onto Facebook.

Features:
  • Organize and tag your photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
  • Quickly and easily upload your photos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
  • Upload your pictures to an existing album or create a new one.

Note: The plug-in currently uses simple pattern matching to match your Windows Live Photo Gallery people tags with your Facebook friends. I'm working on a new interface to make this process much simpler.

Start Uploading!

Here's how to get the plug-in:

LiveUploadFacebook_Menu.png

LiveUploadFacebook_Dialog.png

So, How Did You Make It?

I spent the summer of 2008 out in Redmond as a Software Development Engineer intern working on three separate plug-ins (LiveUpload to YouTube and Sample Flickr Plug-in are the other two). If you're interested in building your own plug-in, the kind folks on the Windows Live Digital Memories Experience Team have a development resource page on building a Windows Live Publish Plug-in. Also, don't miss the Windows Live Photo Gallery Publishing Plug-in Platform Overview over on MSDN. There's even a complete Sample Plug-in for Flickr on there too. Of course, feel free to check out the source code of this plug-in to get started! Omar Shahine, a Microsoft employee, has some tips to share after authoring his very own SmugMug plug-in.
Last edited Nov 18 2008 at 5:22 PM by DuFF, version 5
Comments
Also available: 9 reviews for current release.

chiragpinjar wrote  Nov 19 2008 at 1:35 PM 
This fails on me. The option doesn't get activated in the Publish or Publish->More Services menu at all. In fact I tried the other plugin "LiveUpload to YouTube", which also shows similar behavior.

Any help will be appreciated.

michaelp wrote  Nov 20 2008 at 1:19 AM 
@chiragpinjar Make sure you are using the BETA version of Windows Photo Gallery & Windows Live Movie Maker from http://download.live.com. The new plug-ins ONLY work with the new versions.

bursteg wrote  Nov 20 2008 at 2:47 PM 
I was looking for this kind of plugin. Thank you very much!

InfernoM1ke wrote  Nov 21 2008 at 10:54 AM 
This plugin is brilliant, very quick to use and far better than the crappy Java uploader for us Firefox users.

With regards people tagging, Photo Gallery can tag from a Windows Live Contact list, so would it be possible to scrape email addresses for more accurate people tagging - I tagged three friends exactly as their names appear on Facebook but whilst the tags were added it didn't add tags linking to their profiles, just text tags. Or, could Photo Gallery use Facebook Connect and grab a user's contact list for people tagging, storing the name as well as Facebook ID in the metadata?

marky_towers wrote  Nov 23 2008 at 1:30 PM 
Really wanted a plug in for this - thank you !!

The only thing I'm not sure about is that I've tagged the people in photo gallery, then exported to facebook and while it shows the name of the people its not actually linked to their fb profiles.

Before doing the export to fb, I imported all my outlook contacts into Windows Live Contacts, only a handful are used in my Windows Messenger Client - does that make a difference ?

Explorer5 wrote  Nov 24 2008 at 4:23 AM 
Makes uploading to facebook so quick and easy! I love it! Perfect example of an add-in that increases the value of a piece of software.

hUmAnzZ wrote  Nov 24 2008 at 7:57 AM 
I agree with InfernoM1ke and marky_towers that it'd be great if the wl people tags could be directly mapped to facebook tags (link to profiles) not just display the name.
I know it's a bigger issue that has many problems
1. Mapping WL People to Facebook people
2. Storage of that mapping, whether it should in the images metadata (image files themselves) or outside in a separate storage

The plugin is so great and really a time saver but you should investigate that tags thing.

Thanks for your efforts :)

DuFF wrote  Nov 24 2008 at 3:00 PM 
@InfernoM1ke, @marky_towers, @hUmAnzZ
I'm currently implementing the user interface, along with storage options, for mapping WL People to Facebook friends. Right now I have the mappings stored as persistent information inside my plug-in, shared among saved Facebook accounts on the same computer. The user interface is a simple grid that lets you connect a WL Person tag to a Facebook friend (along with autosuggestions and pictures). I'll try to release screenshots/betas as I can. Any feedback/comments/criticism would be great.

hUmAnzZ wrote  Nov 25 2008 at 12:13 AM 
@DuFF
That's a great thing to hear. I'd also suggest that you have some way to backup/restore these mappings. Coz I think that the mapping step would be an expensive one - from a user's point of view - and that if anything went wrong with his pc, this will be one of the things he'd like to backup.
Thanks for the great work, keep it up :)

chiragpinjar wrote  Nov 25 2008 at 7:40 AM 
@michaelp, it shows in the menu now, it doesn't work though. I have pinged DuFF with the error message.

BrentMorrisRTP wrote  Dec 24 2008 at 12:54 AM 
No Luck here - Installed - No add-on in pull down. Next Closed app, reinstalled, choose to repair, opened app - NO add-on in pull down

housewife wrote  Dec 27 2008 at 5:02 PM 
love you so much if i can add video to facebook >3<

DuFF wrote  Dec 29 2008 at 3:35 PM 
@BrentMorrisRTP
Hey Brent, are you sure you've installed the newest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery? You can get the newest version at http://download.live.com/photogallery. The plug-in only works on builds starting with 14.0... (you can check the build you're using by clicking the question mark icon in the top right and choosing "About Photo Gallery").

@housewife
Unfortunately, Facebook does not offer an official video API yet, so I cannot add the ability to upload videos. If this important to you, please contact Facebook and urge them to release a video API so I can add this functionality.

hfickes wrote  Sat at 3:29 AM 
Thanks for writing and releasing this. Unfortunately I have a bug to report. On Vista I found that you need to be a local admin for the plugin to work. Otherwise it doesn't recognize previously created Facebook accounts and it will fail when trying to connecting to a new Facebook account.

This is a showstopper for me. I don't let my kids run as admins and thus they can't use this tool. I run as an admin, and the tool is great otherwise.

hfickes wrote  Sat at 4:42 AM 
Just to wrap this up for any one who later reads it ... it appears the issue is related to Vista parental controls. See http://www.codeplex.com/liveuploadfacebook/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=8786 for the stack trace.

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