Photo Albums

At some point, real soon now, I shall add a 1 or 2 TB drive as a USB external device to our $25 "everything" home network server (an awesome linksys WRT54G) . Then I shall gather up and archive our music and photos there. Meanwhile, we have digital photos on lots of different services, machines, and media. Some of us prefer photoworks and we have lots of photos there now; they let you store the full resolution of the originals. We have not bumped into any storage limits; we order Kodak prints; they default crop better when they print and we are happy with their quality. I also have lots of photos on mw.spaces.live.com. I would like to put some of these albums on my phone to show to my relatives when I am there next week. So when I went to pull down some of the albums from live.com it said I needed to install "Windows Live Photo Gallery." If I did not work at Microsoft, I would immediately abandon live.com and run screaming for photoworks or some other competitor. Forcing me to install software in such a competitive space as photos is a bad scenario. However I saw the Windows Live Photo Gallery application demonstrated at work a while ago and it has some cool features and I know it is very trustworthy since I work in Trustworthy Computing, so I went for it. I like the album-at-a-time download feature as well as the integration with email. It's also pretty cool how it scans for photos and puts them in albums. So anyway I am making some slide shows now and shall put them on my phone to show them to relatives, just as Arnold did for me in the restaurant -- he showed me a large album of a recent field trip he took with his daughter's class.