Demo: Upload pictures to Windows Live Spaces

My family lives about 3000 miles away, and there was a time when they would hound me for photos. Seemed like every week, my parents would call me up, wanting to get pictures of whatever event had just happened. You know, birthdays, anniversaries, new kids, you name it. Well, I don't have to worry about that any more because these days I post all my photos to a photo sharing site on the Internet, where my friends and family can look at them anytime they want to.

Hi. I’m Dave Johnson, a writer on the Windows team at Microsoft, and today I’m going to show you how you can post your photos to a sharing site.

To get started, the first thing you're going to need is some place on the Internet that you can call home. It doesn't really matter where that is. It can be Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, but I’m going to show you how to use Windows Live Spaces.

First, on the Internet, I’ll go to spaces.live.com and sign in to my page. If you've never used Spaces before, click Get Started to sign up.

Now it’s time to upload some photos. I’ll click Share Photos and then click Add Album.

If this is the first time you’ve uploaded photos to Spaces, you will need to install the Photo Uploader. You’ll only have to do that once, though. After that, when you click Add Photos, you’ll see this list of photos that are on your computer. By default, you'll see photos in your Pictures folder, but you can browse to any folder you like.

One of my pictures is sideways, so I’ll click the rotate arrow to turn it the right way. I'll check each photo that I want to upload. I could also click Select all to upload them all at once. Then I’ll click Upload Now.

The default name for the album is today’s date, but you can change it to anything you want. I’m going to name mine Tour of Washington. Remember to click Save and Close to keep any changes you make to your online albums.

Once you’ve put some photos online, you can click an album to see them. Notice that you can send your friends an e‑mail that has a link to your photos, you can order prints that can be mailed to your home, or you can try any of these other ways to share your photos.

Now, if you use Windows Live Photo Gallery—which you can install from get.live.com—it's even easier to upload your photos to Spaces. Here, let me show you how.

Just open Windows Live Photo Gallery and be sure that you sign in to Windows Live.

Then, simply select all the pictures that you want to upload, and choose to publish them on Windows Live Spaces. You’ll get to name your new album, or you can choose an existing album that you’ve already named. Click Publish, and you’re done. I like this method, because all my photos are already in Photo Gallery, so it’s easy to choose them for uploading.

Now, instead of e‑mailing photos or putting CDs in the mail, you can just upload your photos to Spaces so your friends and family can see your page anytime they want.