They say, “A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words”, and a Blog post with photos, pictures or screenshots enliven it. Windows Live Writer is the best Desktop Blogging Software available today. It has some great inbuilt features but if you add some plugins, you can further extend its functionality. Keeping this in mind we compiled the best picture related plugins for Windows Live Writer.
They say, “A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words”, and a Blog post with photos, pictures or screenshots enlivens it.
Windows Live Writer is the best Desktop Blogging Software available today. It has some great inbuilt features but if you add some plugins, you can further extend its functionality. Keeping this in mind we’ve compiled the best picture/photo/screenshot related plugins for Windows Live Writer.
When we talk about Photos Flickr deserves a mention. Its the most popular photo sharing website on the Internet.
Flickr for writer is a plugin that helps you get your Flickr photos into the blog posts. The plug-in enables a Flickr user (Flickr account is required) to browse their own photos as well as others and insert the content into a blog post using Writer.
The plug-in enables you to search all your content, photosets, or search by tags. It is available for free and can be downloaded from Codeplex. For developers, the code is also made available if you want to contribute fixes and features (that comply with Flickr API terms of use).
Whenever you add photos to a blog post you can enhance their appeal by adding cool effects. Add cool Polaroid-style pictures to your blog with Polaroid Picture WLW Plugin. This plugin allows you to tilt your Polaroid in either direction and even add a text-caption to the photo. You can also configure default options, custom sizes and border styles.
These kind of effects are especially cool if you are writing about an event, party or your travel experiences. Download Polaroid Picture here.
This plugin adds a cool feature to Windows Live Writer. You can change the quality of your inserted photos right from Windows Live Writer, if you are working with a Jpg image, or it gives you the option to edit the image in your favorite image editor right from within the writer.
The plugin now also contains the “Paste as JPG” option which can take images from the clipboard, and paste them as jpeg instead of png. No need to convert the image format. This plugin does the conversion on the fly and this way you can change the photo file size right from the Sharper Photo plugin. You can download the plugin from the Windows Live gallery here.
This plugin will load the Url and take a screen capture of the web site as it appears in Internet Explorer. It will then load the image into your blog posting. You can click on Insert Screen Capture and it will ask you for the Url.
It doesn’t have many options like specifying the size or resizing the image, but you can always resize it right within the Windows Live Writer image options. The advantage of this plugin is that it pulls the screenshot for the website directly into the blog post, thus saving a lot of time. Download it here.
When you are writing a blog post, bullet points can really help you get your point through. This plugin helps you insert customized bullets to emphasize your points. Not only you get rid of those boring black bullets, but you also get the flexibility to use either a set of 42 bullets (or add more if you like!!)
Select from a number of Bullet images to insert in your post.
Like the ones shown on the left
Download the plugin here.
Zemanta is a popular service for suggesting related images, videos and posts related to content that you are posting. While you write relevant links, images and news are being suggested in your right sidebar. You can include them with single click. It makes it easier to do research, and spice up your blog posts with related content.
As the content of the post changes more suggestions are provided. It also suggests if the usage of images in posts is valid or copyright protected. Download it from the Zemanta website here.
SmugMug is another popular photo sharing and upload service. Its free and allows unlimited photo storage and helps you create gorgeous galleries for your photos.
This plugin allows the user to login/ logout to his SmugMug account and create, get, modify, delete, get information, change settings, find, etc. for albums, album templates, categories, family, friends, images, share groups, styles, subcategories, themes, and watermarks.
It also allows the user to get a tree view of all his categories, subcategories, and albums; and to get display names for other users. Download it from CodePlex here.
If you want to reduce the load on your web server caused by usage of heavy images in the blog posts, you can offload that to a service like Imageshack. This simple plugin that will upload your image to www.imageshack.us (a free image hosting service) and insert it in your post. The plugin supports custom sizes.
Click on the plugin link on the sidebar and upload your images after selecting the desired resolution. After upload it would insert the image into the post.
Download this plugin via the Windows Live Writer Plugins Gallery here.
With this plugin you can easily insert images (Links, slideshows) you have in your Picasa Web Albums into your blog. You are able to upload new images into existing albums or create new albums.
The albums are shown on the right sidebar of Windows Live Writer. You can insert the images by selecting the album from the dropdown and then select the picture you would like to insert in the post. Download the plugin here.
Whenever you take a screenshot (via Print Screen or other method) and add it directly to Windows Live Writer, it names it as Imagex.png or jpg and there is no way to change it to a meaningful name.
Once you have taken your screenshot, just go into Writer and click on Insert Clipboard Image, you will then be prompted by the following screen:
You can choose what name you wish to give the file, and what format (the choices are jpg or png). You can also set what the default image format will be from the options. Download Clipboard Capture Plugin here.
I use almost 6 or 7 of above mentioned plugin to make my writing experience with Windows Live Writer faster and more productive. Which of these plugins did you like and would use in the future? Share with us in the comments.
