Microsoft Research Community

All of my photos are (as Microsoft recommends) safely stored (in duplicate, with backup) on Windows Home Server. However, when I try to get Auto Collage to open them, I get a message saying it cannot read photos from a network drive. Excuse me? Why? Can we get that fixed?

Dana Cline - Media Center MVP

<cut and past from separate email to Dana on this issue>

We made a number of decisions while developing AutoCollage to try to ensure the program is stable and performs as well as possible. One of those decisions was to restrict images which can be collaged to locally available files. When the network is quick and working well, network images aren't a problem. However, a huge number of things can go wrong with accessing images over a network, which makes supporting network images consistently a significant work item.

Thank you for your feedback. We're making note of feature requests, and will ensure the ability to read images from the network is on the list.

I've since found this to be a possible blessing - I create a local temp directory and put only the photos I want in the collage. That, plus the manual face detection (which can act as the "area of interest" indicator even if it's not a face) gives me much finer control of what I can do with this program.

Dana Cline - Media Center MVP