Of course, there’s no real need to deactivate it in the Registry.
And if you ever want to deactivate it, just run the “Deactivate Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10 (Default)” hack. Run the “Activate Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10” hack to create the keys and values in the Registry and activate Photo Viewer. Download and unzip the following file:Īctivate-Windows-Photo-Viewer-on-Windows-10 To make things easy, we’ve put together a Registry hack you can use to make these edits quickly because they’re a little cumbersome to make manually. We’ll need to add the same registry entries that were present on Windows 7 and 8.1, and are still present on systems that upgraded from those old versions of Windows. Step One: Enable Photo Viewer in the Registry And after you do that, you can set it as your default photo app. So, how do you get Photo Viewer back? By firing up our old friend Registry Editor, of course. Photo Viewer is actually part of a DLL file named “PhotoViewer.dll” and doesn’t have a separate executable file associated with it.
exe file to associate them with Photo Viewer, either. You also can’t simply point image files at a specific. RELATED: What Are DLL Files, and Why Is One Missing From My PC? Open it up and you can only make Photo Viewer the default association for.
The old “Default Programs” Control Panel app isn’t much help, either. If you navigate to the Default apps pane in Settings, you won’t even see Photo Viewer as an option.
RELATED: How to Set Your Default Apps in Windows 10 Microsoft really wants you to open all those image files in its new Photos app, instead.
Those keys are kept in place if you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but they aren’t created during the installation of Windows 10. Our All-In-One Suites category has programs to view and modify your photos while the Photo Editing, Modifying & Organizing category is for those looking to manage all their photos, and finally the Viewers category are mostly lightweight viewers only.For whatever reason, Microsoft opted not to include the Registry keys that enable access to Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10. You can browse by popularity, read the reviews and pick one that suits your needs. Consider one of many freeware photo viewers or managers. Majorgeeks believes most apps that come with Windows are rarely good enough. Everything should now be reset and working properly.
Now go to the Windows Store, type in Photos in search and install Photos. Open an elevated command-prompt and type in get-appxpackage ** | remove-appxpackage. If you can't uninstall it under Apps & Features, as explained above, then we can forcibly remove Photos with the command-prompt. Don't worry your photos won't be deleted.įrankly, we don't think the Windows 10 Photo app is worth the hassle, but if you have to have it, we can try to remove photos and reinstall. Click on that, and you'll be notified that you'll be deleting the apps data, sign in and preferences. If available, there are options to move or uninstall Photos, but we're looking for the button marked Advanced. Press the Windows Key + S, type in apps and click on Apps & Features. If your file associations are correct, and you want to use the Photos app, let's try to reset it. In our case, you can see that Photos hijacked the JPEG file format, so all we had to do was click and select our favorite app. Scroll down and find JPG or JPEG and click on the Default app associated with that file type and you can choose what program opens it.
On the left, you'll see each file type and on the right what program is associated with that file type. If you need to associate one file type, in this case, JPG, once again press the Windows Key + S, type in default app and click on Choose a default app for each type of file. If you've installed a photo viewer that should also show up as an option. Click on Photo Viewer and choose from Photos, Paint, Paint 3D, or Look for an app in the Store. Press the Windows Key + S, type in default and click on Default app settings. Installing or uninstalling an app can break file associations. TIP: Hard to fix Windows Problems? Repair/Restore Missing Windows OS Files Damaged by Malware with a few clicks