New Windows Live services in beta: Photo Gallery and Folders

This week, the Live Experience team opened the beta programmes for a couple of new services for Windows Live: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Folders beta. (More news on all Windows Live betas is available at http://get.live.com/betas…)

From Chris’ press pass article…

“Windows Live Photo Gallery is an upgrade to Windows Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery, offered at no charge, and enables both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 customers to share, edit, organize and print photos and digital home videos. The initial managed beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery beta is available today in nine markets around the world so far (including the United States (English and Spanish), China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, and Spain), with more to come. We’re really proud of this service because it’s so easy to share photos – it’s really as easy as sending an e-mail. You can also easily publish your photos to your Windows Live Spaces.

“We’re also releasing Windows Live Folders into managed beta today, which will provide customers with 500 megabytes of online storage at no charge. We see this limited managed beta in the United States right now as just a starting point for us, and we’ll begin collecting input from beta users during the testing process, which will be useful when developing future versions of the service. Like I’ve said, it’s very important to us that we give our customers multiple options for connecting to family, friends and information, and share information and other things with the people they care about the most.”

PC Magazine covered the announcement, as did the Seattle Times, and you can sign up for Windows Live Folders here. Windows Live Photo Gallery is (so far) open to a limited number of testers.