[This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change.]

The following diagram shows the interfaces between a publishing plug-in and the hosting Windows Live application.

The publishing plug-in platform communicates with a plug-in through the IPublishPlugin interface, which the plug-in must implement. Each selected photo or video file is passed to the plug-in as a stream; metadata can be read through the IPublishProperties interface. Publishing progress can be displayed to the user through the IPublishProgressCallback interface.

When a publishing plug-in is activated, the hosting Windows Live application makes several calls to the plug-in through the IPublishPlugin interface. The following diagram shows these calls for a typical publishing session.