I’m pretty impressed with the new Photo Story. I’ve been tracking this program since it was a research project so it’s been cool to watch it evolve. However, I did run into something I didn’t like in the new version. Once you’ve built a Photo Story, you can render it to a variety of target profiles. One of the target profiles is for SmartPhone. I’ve recently got an MPx220 so I figured I’d try it out. Didn’t work as Photo Story’s target profile is for SmartPhone with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile which the MPx220 doesn’t have installed. Woops. And you can’t upgrade the device to WMP10 Mobile. Double woops.
While I’m annoyed that I can’t install WMP10 Mobile on my MPx220, I’m more annoyed at Photo Story. There’s no way to build a custom target profile that would work with my phone. I was able to build an encoder profile to convert a Photo Story rendered for the desktop to be converted down to work well on the SmartPhone. Why can’t I just do that inside Photo Story?