I’m kind of a stickler for keeping things organized so I don’t have duplicates of things running amok all over my computer’s hard drive. So I keep folders for the photos of each trip I take, but I also upload that folder as an album on my Live Spaces place. Then, when I write about my trip in a blog posting, I’ll use the photos from my Live Spaces album to illustrate my blog posting (see this post for an example).
There is a couple ways to do this. Since Live Writer doesn’t include a way to import your Live Spaces photos, you can hunt down the URL for the photo, copy it, then paste it into the Add Photo dialogue box when you’re making a post OR you can install an add-in to Live Writer. An add-in adds extra capabilities that Live Writer didn’t originally come installed with. One of my favorites is the Live Spaces Photo Album Plug-in written by Scott. This allows you to browse your Live Spaces photo albums and insert a photo into a blog posting.
So here’s my usual work flow when I work with my vacation photos and want to write about my trip:
First I import my photos from my digital camera into Windows Live Photo Gallery. I always create a folder for each vacation or trip so if I’m looking through Windows Explorer I can still locate the photos I’m looking for quickly. Once the photos are in Live Gallery, title and tag your photos. I start with generalized tags first, then start narrowing down. For example:
This photo was from my vacation to California a couple years ago. It’s tags in Live Gallery appear something like this: Vacation, California, Sonoma, Fort Ross. Live Gallery uses the digital date information from the camera by default so I don’t need to include dates, unless I wanted to. If there were people I knew in the photo, I’d add their names (Mom, Dad etc.), or if it was a specific event, I’d add the event name (Birthday, Anniversary, etc.) Tagging photos in Live Gallery makes searching exactly what you’re looking for so much easier, and secondly, tagging photos just after you’ve imported them keeps you from having a huge bunch of un-tagged photos that you’ll later have to spend hours sifting through and tagging later. I speak from experience in this! (TIP: You can add a tag to multiple photos at the same time by selecting all of the photos, or during the import process.)
So, once your photos are imported into Live Photo Gallery, titled, tagged etc. Then I publish them to my Live Spaces by selecting the photos I want to publish, then clicking the “Publish” button at the top of Live Gallery and selecting “Publish on Windows Live Spaces.” Create a new album, or select an existing album to add your photos to. I always tick the box that says “Optimize photos for printing”, just in case my family wishes to print the photo or order prints from the online webservice. Then click “Publish”. Voila! So now you’re photos are online.
When I write about my vacations, I’ll generally use Live Writer. Don’t forget to have installed the Insert From Spaces Album plug in! Once the plug-in has installed it will appear under the Insert menu or on the right hand column panel under “Insert”. When you’re writing your vacation entry and want to insert a photo from your album, click the Insert from Spaces Album button, enter your Live Space name and click “Load Albums”, select the album you wish to view and click “Load Pictures”. Select the photo you want, then click “insert” and it will insert itself into your blog posting. Resize your photo by dragging the corners to fit into your blog post.
Now you can illustrate your vacation blog postings with all your great travel photos and still have your full photo album on your Live Spaces albums and keep everything organized without your photos ending up in multiple albums. 
