Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I love Windows Live Photo Gallery. Apart from the fact that it is free, is the best camera import tool I have found, can display RAW images (with the right codecs installed), can publish to flickr, facebook and YouTube, has facial recognition built in and other cool features, it also has another really cool feature – editing with a revert to original option.

So this week I discovered something about that. I had been noticing my C drive space slowly decreasing. Now seeing as I only have Windows 7 and all my programs installed on the C drive and most of my data is contained on other drives, I was wondering what was going on. A quick search found the bulk of the data was in two folders, my outlook data folder where I had an unused old archive sitting (10GB) and then a folder called

C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images. There was some 20GB in here

When I looked I was amazed to see a bunch of photos. Some research turned up these facts.

• Windows live Photo Gallery gives you the option to save original images and retain them for a period of days or forever (File | Options)
• When you edit a picture the original is saved in this folder and you have the ability from Live Photo Gallery to revert to original if you desire.
• The original file is saved in the users folder who made the edits – meaning that if you have photos stored in a shared folder the originals are only available to the user who made the edits.
• The application makes use of a folder structure called KnownFolders. There is a lot of information on this in MSDN.

Here are some of the pages I trawled through working this out.

• Windows Photo Gallery FAQ
• John Federico
• Synchronise Photos on Two Computers
• MS KB 944370 reverting to original images
• MSDN Known Folders
• MSDN Working with Known Folders
• MSDN KNWONFOLDERID

I searched for some registry hacks, if there were any that existed, to move the original images folder somewhere away from the default location – eg to a shared folder as the OriginalImages folder is a folder type that can be redirected. However I was unable to find anybody who hade even tried this let alone shared a registry hack to make this work.

Other Windows Live News

• Windows Live 2010 is getting the ribbon
• Microsoft OneAlbum: Fusing Facial Recognition and Social Networks – The Future of Windows Live Photos?
• 1.6 billion IM sessions per month are over 30 minutes long per Angus Logan
• IE8 has facebook webslices, search provider and accelerators now