Windows Live Wave 3

I see that the latest versions of the standalone applications (including Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer) have now been released. This download page is still currently describing the applications as “beta”, but the applications themselves seem to have dropped that moniker from their titles.

I’m pleased to see that at least one bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery that I reported to Microsoft over a year ago has finally been corrected.

I’m using Windows Live Writer to create this post, and one thing that I want to check is how it handles image metadata. While it’s very easy to use WLW to insert images into your blog, the previous version seemed to be stripping out image metadata, and therefore creating orphan works, which I think is a very bad idea. So, here’s a test image, which in the original has my copyright information and IPTC Coreinformation as metadata embedded in the file.

Once an image is published in my blog, it can be downloaded from there as well. Let’s see what has happened to the metadata…

Yep, all the metadata has been stripped out – copyright, creator, keywords – everything. That’s not good, in my opinion.