San Francisco Ferry Terminal morning exercise

If you use photos in your blogs, you need Windows Live Writer (combined text editor and photo editor for blogs) — keep reading.

If you use a Mac for blogging, it won’t work for you, stop reading.

What can you say about a text editor?  It edits text, sure enough, and it’s free, Oh, boy!  But you can say the same about many other text editors.

But Wait!  An integrated photo editor that’s free, easy to use and customizes high quality pictures for the blogger’s medium – well, that’s almost enough to make inveterate Microsoft-haters stop hating Microsoft (OK, nothing’s that good).

But Live Writer is so good, you can stop using Photoshop to edit pictures for your blog posts.

Anathema, you say?  Well, Ha!

Yes, you can work from jpg’s never touched by Photoshop.  The picture editing commands in Live Writer (they appear on the right side when you click on an image in your post) are intuitively obvious.  You can

• change how text wraps around a picture
• change margins and borders (in this post I’ve used a 1 pixel line, but there are other borders available with a single click, including the kitschy drop shadow, if that fits your style).
• resize and crop (in this post, I  duplicated the main photo below and cropped from it the square image now at the top left – first time through the procedure took me about a minute, second time needed less than 20 seconds, including placement in the post).
• adjust a picture’s brightness and contrast (oops – this really is anathema to Photoshop users, and I could not steel my sensibilities to use it).  If you have a really bad picture that you really must publish, then fix it in Photoshop with levels and curves.
• And then it has a bunch of simplified Photoshop like effects e.g. convert color photo to black and white or sepia, sharpen or add gaussian blur, adjust temperature – good stuff like that.

The photo below is enlarged in Windows Live Writer beyond its original size on my website.

Man Rising, San Francisco Ferry Terminal, Bay Bridge in Background

If you right click on either image, you can see and read their Alt Text, which is readily facilitated by Windows Live Writer. Search engine crawlers read Alt Text; thus, it often affects the post’s SEO ranking and retrieval.

Live Writer seems to work as well with Firefox as with Microsoft Internet Explorer.  It is also said to work with many other blogging platforms, Movable Type, Blogger, and the like.

And, yes, it’s free.

Peter Neibert

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This entry was posted on October 22, 2009 at 12:14 am and is filed under Blog Software, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.