Insert Picture from Web: Windows Live Writer in Windows 7

This incident just goes to show I'm the type that's always late to the party.

I finally updated my main machine last week to Windows 7 Ultimate (the last PC I have to be so upgraded) and so this afternoon happened to be the first time I wrote a blog post on Windows 7. Not only that but this particular blog post also needed to include an image from the web. Since I use Windows Live Writer (WLW), I duly went to Insert | Picture, and the old dialog had gone to be replaced by the standard Windows 7 FileOpen dialog. This dialog has no capability to insert an image from the web. What the...?

A bit of surfing later, I came across this apologetic blog post from May from Brandon Turner who's on the WLW team at Microsoft. It seems that Windows 7 had caused a bug in their custom file open dialog (viz., support for libraries) so they abandoned the custom code for the standard dialog. At the time they rationalized that practically no one used the Insert picture from web functionality and so practically no one would notice. Ha!

Anyway Brandon describes a workaround that would work until they add the Insert picture from web functionality back. In a browser, go to the page that contains the image (somewhat hard if you're storing the image on Amazon S3, but moving right along...), right-click on the image and select "Copy" (on Firefox, it's Copy Image Location; on Chrome, it's Copy Image URL). Now go to WLW and paste it where you want the image to appear. WLW will create the correct <img> element in your page to point to the URL on the web.

I will also note in passing — donning my DevExpress hat to do so — that this demonstrates an extremely good reason to avoid custom file open dialogs when writing applications (or when purchasing component libraries).

Now playing:
Waterboys - Suffer
(from Dream Harder)

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