Windows Live Photo Gallery and Movie Maker come with Windows 7, but are free to download and will make working with your photo images insanely easy. Movie Maker is also a pretty nifty tool -- and one that should make YouTube happy, because I can see many families posting simple slide shows from this tool.You can see the video demonstration of both Photo Gallery and Movie Maker below.

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You can also read Paul McDougall's story from earlier today on what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had to say about Windows 7.

Photo Gallery lets you capture, manage and share images. There's also built in uploads for Windows Live and Flickr, and plug ins let you easily upload to Facebook, SmugMug and Picasa Web also. A Twitpic plug in doesn't exist yet that I know of, but that would be a natural extension.

The fun starts when you pull some of these images into Movie Maker and hit "auto movie." You can toss a little music behind the images, and voila, you've got a video slide show of a trip, a night out, scenic views.

Now this is mostly what Movie Maker is intended to do, and you can easily upload these movies to YouTube right from the application (at varying levels of quality), but there are some other nice features as well. For example, you can add visual affects to the pictures (select ones or multiple), create titles and lower thirds with transitions that you can customize with simple tools Microsoft has provided. You can bring in actual movie files and mix that in also -- and those movie files can be quickly edited right inside the application. You can output these movies as Windows media files.

Movie Maker probably isn't going to be your tool for industrial strength video editing, but it's a very nifty way to edit some images together for a nice video.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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