Image Editing in EditLive

A week ago, JJ Allaire and his team at Microsoft released Windows Live Writer for desktop blogging. Having used it for a week or so now I must say I am impressed with a couple of their simple image editing capabilities.

Images are a common item that many people want to integrate into web content. Live Writer's ability to simply resize an image and have it create a link to a original larger image is simple yet handy. As is its ability to add a drop shadow. These two features only apply to local images so that it knows it has to upload both the larger image and the smaller thumbnail.

These sorts of capabilities could be we something we look at for a future release of EditLive!   These features certainly would have been useful for updating the EditLive! feature tour which we need to do in the next couple of weeks.

An Ephox partner from Ireland, USL Technologies, did do an integration of their feature rich image editor Netimager to EditLive! and this might be something that we could look at tapping into.

What are the critical features you are looking for with respect to images in web content?

My list of must have features would include:

• Resize (and automatically resample)
• Add Border (drop shadow[default], photo paper, none)
• Rotate
• Reset Image
• Cropping

(note: things we already do are resizing without resampling, image alignment, margins, alternative text)

Another issue would be how to implement this in our user interface... Windows Live Writer uses a side bar concept that we don't have and probably couldn't fit. A combination of context menu options and additions to our Image Properties dialog would probably suffice.

Another issue would be how to store edits such as text overlay so that they remain editable after round tripping with the server (like we do with equation editing). But this is probably reaching a level of sophistication not required for most image editing activities. In fact, arguably these are not additions to our image editing capabilities, but rather extensions to our existing image uploading capabilities.

Oh, and in case you are wondering the photo in this posting was taken on Noosa Main Beach :)

Tags: Windows Live Writer, EditLive, Ephox, image editing, content management, CMS