As a developer when I am working on Windows Desktop programs I take lots of screen shots. (The Snipping Tool is very handy for this by the way.) Then when I want to view a sequence of them I have just double clicked and had the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer open the photo. I would often use it to scroll through a few screen shots and zoom in and zoom out. Occasionally I may print a shot or two out to discuss with others and write some notes on.
In Windows 8 the default image viewing program is the Photos "Windows Store App" by Microsoft. When I double click a photo it takes over and goes full screen. That was a little jarring to my normal work-flow but manageable, I could drag it to the second monitor. The real trouble started when I wanted to view more than one photo. I could not figure out how to get more than one to show up to scroll through. The Pictures Library said it had two ("Pictures library 2") photos on the app's start screen, and when I clicked Pictures Library, it then said it only had one ("Pictures library 1 file"), despite the fact that my Pictures folder is chock-full of images. I read in the store reviews and other places online that I am not the only one experiencing this issue. One guy in the store pointed out that you can't print a picture from the app (at least there is no obvious interface that he or I can find.) I tried both fix solutions suggested by Microsoft Support Engineer Nithyananda J, re-installing the app and running the Modern UI App troubleshooter. No dice.
My fix for the Photos app is to avoid it. Just go to the Default Programs control panel and Associate a file type or protocol with a program and change as many of the image types that are currently associated with the Photos app to Windows Photo Viewer that you want. Now forward and back navigation buttons and printing are all right in front of me and they all work the way I'm use to.
Do you have another built-in or Windows Store app that works better?
The Gallery HD app is pretty close to what I was after. It scanned my Library folders for images and displays them. I can get properties on an image to get it's name (but not it's location) and exposure information. But, there were missing images. It appears that this app only looks for JPEG images. Makes sense with it's focus on Photographs, and not a generic picture/image viewer.
ReplyDeleteI tried the Photo View app despite it's one lone review complaining of the same failure to load pictures from the Library that I was having with the MS Photos app. It picked up many (all?) of my images in my library, but the app is too simple. It pops up some seemingly random image in the collection and I can navigate forwards and backwards to cycle through it's list. I can't focus on some folder or group or get any information on the file's name or location.
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