How to restore old photo viewer in windows 10

How to restore old photo viewer in Windows 10 step by step

If you upgrade from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Windows 10, you will have Windows Photo Viewer available as an option. On the other hand, if you install the new Windows 10 from scratch, the Windows Photo Viewer will not be available for you to use.

The Photo Viewer is no longer in the Windows registry

For whatever reason, Microsoft chose not to include the registry keys that allow access to the Photo Viewer in Windows 10. It is maintained if you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but it is not available in the current version. Microsoft wants you to open all the image files in the new Photos app, not the old Photo Viewer.

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To corroborate this, navigate to Settings> System> Default Applications. When you click on “ Photo Viewer ” you will see that it does not work, since it is not available as an option. Also, if you try from Control Panel> "Default Programs" you will not be able to either.

Scroll down to " Set Default Programs." A list will appear with all the programs available on your computer. Choose " Windows Photo Viewer " and then " Choose default options for this program." Here you will see that it only allows you to associate files of type.tif and.tiff, and not other types of images.

Add the entries to the registry

We are going to add the same registry entries that are present in Windows 7 and 8.1, and are still present on systems that have been upgraded from old versions of Windows, but are not available on premises from scratch.

To do this, follow these steps:

Copy the following code into Notepad and save it as a file with a.REG extension (call it what you want, for example, photos.reg).

After saving the file with the code, double-click the new REG file to combine it with the Windows Registry.

You should now be able to see Windows Photo Viewer and set it as the default program for various image files. To do this, open the Control Panel and go to Default Programs> Set Default Programs. Locate Windows Photo Viewer in the list of programs, click on it and select "Set this program as default". This will set Windows Photo Viewer as the default program for all image file types.

As we said, this is only necessary if you are using a new Windows 10. If you have updated from Windows 7 or 8.1, you should be able to set Windows Photo Viewer as your default application without having to perform these steps.

Associating the Photo Viewer

Now you can right-click on an image file type, for example, a.png,.jpg,.gif, or.bmp and select "Open with" and "Choose another application".

In the new window, click on Windows Photo Viewer and activate the option "Always use this application to open files".

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Windows Photo Viewer will now be the default image viewer for that type of image file. You will have to repeat this process for each type of image file you want to open with this viewer.

To summarize, every time when opening an image it is opened in the Photos application, simply close the image and use the "Open with" option in the menu to associate the file type with the Windows Photo Viewer.

As always, we recommend reading our tutorials for Windows and computing. You can ask us any questions, we will try to resolve them as soon as possible.