Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta is here

This cool new Photo Gallery tool from Windows Vista is at last available for Windows XP.

This was a Vista only program but, recently, it was released as a private beta, now it's public. You can download it from here: http://get.live.com/betas/photogallery_betas.

To use it, you’ll need to have Windows XP SP2 installed and expect the download and installation process to take a while - actually, scrub that, it takes ages.

However, it looks great, it has the Vista look to it and it's a worthy replacement for the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

It has a great panorama assembly tool under the Make menu - just select the panorama images first then click this option.

Overall the program is pretty good and probably the biggest missing omission is a good rotation tool. While it rotates in 90 degree increments it sorely needs a tool that rotates in tiny quantities like fractions of a degree.