Microsoft Photos is an

image viewer An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as color depth ...

image organizer An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organising digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications. Image organizer software is primarily focused on imp ...

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap images) such as JPEG, PNG, and GI ...

, photo sharing app, and video clip editor developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

. It was first included in

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

as a functional replacement for

Windows Photo Viewer Windows Photo Viewer (formerly Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) is an image viewer included with the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was first included with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 under its former name. It was temporarily ...

. Photos has

Microsoft Sway Microsoft Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Sway was offered for general release by Microsoft in August 2015. It allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to cre ...

integration and can use selected photos as a source for creating a Sway project. Users can also upload photos to

OneDrive Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) is a file hosting service operated by Microsoft. First launched in August 2007, it enables registered users to share and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage backend of the web vers ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

and

GroupMe GroupMe is a mobile group messaging app owned by Microsoft. It was launched in May 2010 by the private company GroupMe. In August 2011, GroupMe delivered over 100 million messages each month and by June 2012, that number jumped to 550 million. ...

for sharing.

Photo management

Microsoft Photos is a single-instance app that can organize digital photos in its gallery into albums. The default view is ''Collection'', which is sorted by date. Users can also view items by ''Album'' or ''Folder''. The album view shows both auto-generated and user-generated albums. The folder view displays files based on their location in the

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

or on

. Users can choose what folders are displayed and which files are placed in albums.

Photo editing

Microsoft Photos provides the following basic

functions: * Crop and rotate * Correct exposure or colors * Fix red eye * Remove spots and blemishes * Reduce image noise Users can edit with a sidebar similar to the one in Google Photos, which allows them to adjust the photo's shadows, highlights,

sharpness Sharpness ( ) is an English port in Gloucestershire, one of the most inland in Britain, and eighth largest in the South West. It is on the River Severn at , at a point where the tidal range, though less than at Avonmouth downstream ( typical s ...

, and filters. Further, Photos also allows users to trim, slow down, and save photos from videos. Photo editing technologies developed by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technolog ...

, including Panoramic stitching, Photo Fuse, and AutoCollage are not currently included in Photos. Neither is the ability to batch resize photos, where multiple photos can be resized in a single action. Unlike Photo Gallery, which autosaves edits, Photos only saves when a user clicks the Save or Save As button. Photos allows users to compare the original file to the file with unsaved changes and to save the photo with a different name and location.

Video Editor

Video Editor (formerly Story Remix) is a

video editing software Video editing software, or a video editor is software used performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a non-linear editing system. It has replaced traditional flatbed celluloid film editing tools and analog video ...

built into the Photos app. Intended to replace the older

Windows Movie Maker Windows Movie Maker (known as Windows Live Movie Maker for the 2009 and 2011 releases) is a discontinued video editing software program by Microsoft. It was first included in Windows Me on September 14, 2000 and in Windows XP on October 25, 2001 ...

, this feature was added to Microsoft Photos with the Fall Creators Update to Windows 10. Video Editor uses AI and to organize and transform photos and videos into stories. Video Editor allows users to create videos from pictures and songs. It also contains features to add 3D effects, soundtracks, 3D animations, and styles to the videos. The tool includes an "Add narration" feature in Windows 10 Pro, which allows the user to add multiple audio clips to their video.

Photo and video import

The Photos app's photo/video import tool provides the ability to view and select photos that are automatically grouped by date taken and choose where the files are saved. The Photos app can show individual pictures, display all pictures in a folder as a slide show, reorient them in 90° increments or through a granular control, print them either directly or via an online print service, send them in e-mail or save them to a folder or disc. It supports images in

Animated GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

, BMP,

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

JPEG XR JPEG XR (JPEG extended range) is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo (formerly Windows Media Photo) specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy a ...

(formerly HD Photo), PNG,

ICO is an action-adventure game developed by Japan Studio and Team Ico, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, released for the PlayStation 2 video game console in 2001 and 2002 in various regions. It was designed and directed by Fumito Ued ...

, RAW, PANO, and

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word process ...

file formats.

Evolution

Photos is built from a separate code base from those of Photo Gallery and Windows Photo Viewer. It was first included in Windows 8.0 and had a customizable background and a Facebook photo viewer, both of which were removed in the

Windows 8.1 Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...

update to the app. It also introduced the ability to view immersive photo PANO files and set a photo as the app's live tile or the Windows lock screen. Like most other apps designed for Windows 8, the controls were hidden until the user right-clicks on the screen. In Windows 10, Photos originally used a

hamburger menu The hamburger button (the triple bar ≡ or trigram symbol ☰), so named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu (sometime ...

for the photo management interface and to make basic controls visible to users. Unlike most Microsoft apps designed specifically for Windows 10, Photos used round buttons like the ones on Windows 8 for editing. Control categories were listed as buttons on the left side of the app, and specific editing options were listed as buttons on the right side of the app. Folder view and the ability for users to edit albums were added to the app after the initial release on Windows 10 in response to user feedback. Photos includes all features from Windows Photo Viewer except the Burn to Disc feature and may gain more features from Photo Gallery in the future. The original view exclusively featured a

dark theme A light-on-dark color scheme —also called black mode, dark mode, dark theme, night mode, or lights-out (mode)— is a color scheme that uses light-colored text, icons, and graphical user interface elements on a dark background. It is often d ...

. A major update in October 2016 replaced the hamburger menu with a ribbon, replaced the radial editing tools with an editing sidebar, and added a full-screen view, ink editing for photos and videos, and a light theme. In 2022, a new version of the Photos app was released for Windows 11 with changes in the user interface matching the design of Windows 11. This version has improved and enhanced photo editing features, and a brand new icon. The former Photos app from Windows 10 has been renamed to "Photos Legacy" in Windows 11.

References

External links

Microsoft Photos
on

Microsoft Store Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform app ...

Photos Add-on
on Microsoft Store
Microsoft Photos Legacy
on Microsoft Store
Photos help – Windows Help
{{Media player software , expanded=listname Windows components Image organizers Photo stitching software Universal Windows Platform apps 2012 software Xbox One software Windows media players Windows-only freeware Video editing software for Windows

Photos A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now create ...