We’re excited to share that Windows Live Writer 2009 is now officially available for download with Windows Live Essentials!

This is the same version of Writer as the release candidate from last month. If you’ve already installed the release candidate you do not need to upgrade at this time.

Windows Live Writer 2009
Version 14.0.8050.1202

Release Highlights (jump to full feature list)

Sharing photos and video
Here are some of the ways that Writer makes sharing photos and video on your blog even easier than before:

Crop, tilt and new photo treatments
Starting with the basics, Writer now has native editing features for photos - like crop and tilt - in addition to improved border treatments. The alignment commands in the toolbar now work with images so it’s easy to select multiple photos and, for example, center-align them. 

To the right is an example of photo that is titled, right-aligned, and uses the “Instant photo” border (HINT: click the photo to see what happens). 

Photo albums
It’s also much easier to insert multiple photos at once as either individual thumbnails or a Windows Live photo album.

Inserting a Windows Live photo album offers you several different album styles to display inside your post. When you publish your blog post, Writer will automatically upload a photo album to Windows Live and link the album in your post to the album on Windows Live. Here’s an example of photo album using the “Scatter” style:

View Full Album

Video
Now you can insert a video from your computer and have it automatically published to either YouTube or Soapbox when you publish your blog. Just like before, Writer will automatically embed an in-line video in your post and publish your video when you publish the post to your blog.

New plug-ins
Also, for those of you who might have missed the release candidate last month, there are new Writer plug-ins available on Windows Live Gallery that you might like:

Full Feature List
In addition to the highlights of this release, here’s the list of all the major new features added since Windows Live Writer 2008:

• New border treatments (including Instant Photo)
• Crop and tilt photos
• Insert multiple photos
• Toolbar alignment commands enabled for images
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Additional spell checking languages: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (for supported blogs)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Twitter, Digg and Flickr Plug-ins
• Improved blog account setup
• Lightbox and Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Improved category control: adding categories, type-down filtering
• Tabbed view switching
• AutoLink glossary
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count
• Support for bidirectional languages (like Hebrew and Arabic)
• Tabs for view switching
• Updated look and feel

As always, we can’t wait to hear what you think.

The Writer Team
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