Hi everyone, Michael Palermiti here - I'm a program manager on the Windows Live Photo Gallery team. As part of the new beta release we announced today we're also announcing some new extensibility interfaces for Photo Gallery beta. One of the most requested features we've heard this past year from users (and developers!) is more support for sharing services.

Today, I'm pleased to announce a brand new, simple framework that enables developers to create photo and video publishing plug-ins. The framework defines a set of interfaces that facilitate communication between Photo Gallery and the plug-in. The plug-in developer has creative control of the user interface of the plug-in and handles the details of communication with the 3rd party service. Plug-ins are managed applications; .NET Framework 2.0 or greater is required for the plug-ins.

Once a plug-in is installed they will be accessible right on the Publish menu under More services.

We're excited about what the community will come up with. You can get all the developer resources you'll need over on new Photo Gallery web page on this site: http://dev.live.com/photogallery. On our team blog we'll be blogging a lot more about this and all the slick new features in the beta.