Windows 10 – How to bring back Windows Photo Viewer

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Windows 10 comes with a range of new applications for using your files, one of these is ‘Photos’ which replaces Windows Photo Viewer (also known as Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) from Windows 7 and 8.

If you preferred the old Windows Photo Viewer the good news is you can re-enable it in Windows 10.

There are two ways to bring back the Windows Photo Viewer –

  1. Uninstall the Photos app – this will automatically re-enable the Windows Photo Viewer application and set it to handle all your image types – see Windows 10 – How to uninstall Photos app
  2. Install a registry modification and manually assign each image type to open in the Windows Photo Viewer application – see steps below.

How to restore Windows Photo Viewer manually

Step 1 – Install registry modification

Download: Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer.zip

  1. Download Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer.zip
  2. Open ZIP  file
  3. Run Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer.reg
  4. When prompted, choose ‘Yes’ to import registry setting

Step 2 – Set Windows Picture and Fax Viewer as default app

Once the registry modification is installed you can choose Windows Photo Viewer as the default profile for images.

  1. Make sure you have done step 1 above
  2. Right click on an image, choose ‘Open with’ then ‘Choose another app’
  3. Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer1
  4. Scroll to the bottom of the list, click on ‘More apps’
  5. Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer2
  6. From the list, select Windows Photo viewer’
  7. Tick ‘Always use this app to open .png files’ and click ‘OK’
  8. Windows10-RestorePhotoViewer3
  9. PNG files will now open in Windows Photo Viewer – you will need to repeat this process for other image file types as you come across this (e.g. jpg, jpeg, tiff, gif).

 

 

Reference: http://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/8930-windows-photo-viewer-gone-2.html#post290818