Slide Show Quality in Windows Live Photo Gallery

Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) can display selected photos as a slide show. In the new beta of the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, the slide show capability is still present, but Microsoft have changed the way in which it is done. Instead of having this capability within WLPG itself, it uses the new version of Windows Live Movie Maker to make and display the slide show.

The problem is, the quality of the slide shows produced by Windows Live Movie Maker is terrible. Photos displayed as slides are blurry and noticeably degraded in quality.  I would be ashamed to show slides to family and friends using it.

I raised this in the Windows Live help forum for Photo Gallery. The first response back from Microsoft was to deny that anything had changed between WLPG version 3 and the beta of version 4. However, once I sent them proof, then they admitted that things had changed and:

“it appears that photo quality in slide shows in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta is indeed a bit degraded when compared to the original file source”.

I love that “a bit degraded”. No, Microsoft, it is noticeably degraded to the extent that it is unacceptable. The quality of the slide shows produced by Windows Live Movie Maker is simply not good enough. So now I will have to find an alternative to WLPG in order to show slides to friends and family.