How to add Polariod-style pictures into your blog posts

Posted on November 12, 2008 at 5:32 am

Windows Live Writer is an excellent blogging tool with a lot of possible choices of extensions to enhance your blogs. With a plug-in to enhance your ordinary pictures, you can achieve Polaroid-style pictures with tilts and captions. This plugin gives pictures a more dramatic or nostalgic effect. See some of the examples I got using this plugin:

If you don’t have Windows Live Writer yet you will need to get it from Windows Live website.

After installing Windows Live Writer, you can add plug-ins to it to enhance your blogs. To access the plug-ins click on the “Add a Plug-in…” label at the lower right part of the Windows Live Writer window:

An alternative way is to go to the Extensions website to see the available plugins:

http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8

Either way you should see your default browser open. Search for “Polaroid” on the “Gallery” search box then Click “Download” button to download the installer for this plugin:

After downloading the .msi (MS installer) file, double click it to launch the Wizard based installer. Follow the OK and Next buttons to install the plugin.

After installing the plugin, open your Windows Live Writer then click the “insert” menu button then “Polaroid Picture…”:

You should see the right hand side open with the parameter editor for Polaroid plugin:

You can change the tilt angle, caption, style (corners), and predefined size.

With this simple and straightforward Polaroid Picture plugin, I was able to be more creative with my blog pictures. Traditionally you will need to edit your pictures using a picture editor software like Adobe Photoshop to achieve this effect but this plugin let’s you do that without the need of editing your pictures.