Windows Live Photo Gallery - Beware

[John]

I have being testing this software recently and really liked some of the features such as tagging and facial recognition. I have over 200GB of photo files which are a mixture of jpeg, nef and tiff files and while backing up last night the backup software wanted to backup the entire library again rather than the new/changed files.

I checked the file sizes of the "orignals" against the backups and found they were almost all different for some reason. It turns out that the MS software was writing changes to the original file and was recompressing jpegs in the process using a default setting of 80%. Recompressing jpegs is always a bad idea and to do it at 80% quality is just insane.

The software is now uninstalled and I am busy restoring from my backups with nothing lost apart from several hours time. I pity anyone who hits this issue and doesn't have backups.