Photos

The Photos app lets you view, edit, manage, and share photos, other images, and videos stored on your PC, removable storage devices, your phone, OneDrive, and, optionally, Apple iCloud.

Defaults

Photos is the default in-box app for image files–including popular formats like .bmp, .gif, .heic, .jpg, .png, .raw, and many others–in Windows 11. It works well in this regard and offers a wide variety of image viewing, editing, and management functionality. Oddly, there are three discrete experiences, each of which appears in its own app window:

• Photo viewer. When you open an image file from the Photos app, File Explorer, or the Desktop, the app’s photo viewer window appears to display the image.

• Photo browser. When you open the Photos app directly from Start or elsewhere, its full app experience appears. This window includes a navigation pane and a Gallery view with thumbnails of your photos, sources. The navigation pane is configured with links to Gallery, Favorites, OneDrive, iCloud Photos, and This PC views, plus a collapsible overview of your OneDrive storage and its phone integration capabilities. And there is an “Import” button for copying photos from a phone or other device connected to the PC via USB.

• Photo editor. If you choose to edit a photo from the photo viewer or main Photos app window, the editor experience appears. If you do this from the photo viewer, this experience replaces the viewer experience in the same window. If you do this from the main Photos app, the editor experience appears in its own window.

By default, Photos is configured to use a Dark app theme across each of its experiences and windows, even if you’ve configured Windows 11 to use a Light app theme.

Also, the capabilities provided by Photos can vary depending on your PC. Those with a Copilot+ PC get additional functionality that uses the on-device local AI models provided by the platform in the main Photos app and the Photo editor experience. Features unique to Copilot+ PCs are highlighted as needed throughout the chapter.

Customize

You customize some Photos features directly in the app and with the in-app settings page. But its file associations are configured in the Windows 11 Settings app or, on a case-by-case basis, when you open an image file in File Explorer.

Photos settings

To access this app’s settings page, open Photos and click the “Settings” (gear) icon in the top right of the window.

Most of this is fairly obvious, but you should disable “Show iCloud Photos” if you don’t use an iPhone or have photos stored in Apple’s iCloud storage service. If you will use Photos to manage your photo collection, you should also consider changing “Enable Location Based Features” to “On.”

Gallery is the default view and it commingles photos, other images, and videos from multiple sources–OneDrive cloud storage, your iCloud Photos collection (if available), and your local PC–in into a single “River” layout by default. This view is customizable–there are sorting, filter, and layout options at its top–and you can select multiple images to back them up to OneDrive, move or copy them, and perform other actions.

You can click the “Add folder” button next to the Gallery item to add any folder on your PC to Photos so that its contents appear in the app. Less obviously, you can make the following two configuration changes directly in the navigation bar:

• Remove your Picture folder. If you don’t want the contents of your Pictures folder–including Screenshots and any other sub-folders–to appear in the Photos app, right-click the “Pictures” item in the navigation bar and choose “Remove folder from Microsoft Photos” in the menu that appears.
• Add a folder. As per the “Add folder” button noted above, you can right-click “This PC” in the navigation bar and choose “Add folder” in the menu that appears to add a folder as well.

Configure Photos app file associations

You can view and edit the file types associated with the Photos app by opening the Settings app and navigating to Apps > Default apps > Photos.

Because there is no “Select all” or “Select all image file types” option, this interface can be tedious to use. Fortunately, it’s easier to do this on a case-by-case basis in File Explorer (including on the Desktop). Indeed, you will sometimes be given this choice automatically.

If you install an app that can open image files, Windows 11 will ask you which app you wish to use the next time you try to open an image file in File Explorer or on the Desktop. To continue using Photos for this purpose, select it in the dialog and then click “Always.”

You can also manually make this change at any time: Right-click an image file in File Explorer and choose “Open with” and “Choose another app” from the menu that appears. As above, you can then select Photos and then click “Always.”

View an image

Photos offers a relatively sophisticated photo viewing experience. There is an incredible range of functionality here, spread out to various buttons and other controls in the four corners and bottom center of the app.

Tools found in the top left of the photo viewer

• Edit. Click this button to replace the Photos photo viewer experience with its image editing experience.

More info: The image editing experience is described in the next section.

• Rotate. Click this button to rotate the image 90 degrees to the right.
• Delete. Click this button to delete the image. You will be prompted to make sure this is what you want.
• Print. Click this button to display a Print dialog and print the image to a physical printer or PDF file.
• Share options. Click this button to display the Windows Share pane so that you can share the image with your phone (if connected), Outlook, Nearby sharing, or any compatible apps.

• Start slideshow. If there are other images in the folder that contains the image you’re viewing, this button will appear in the upper-left so you can view a slideshow of all the images there.

Tools found in the “See more” overflow menu in the top left of the photo viewer

• Save as. Click this item to save the image to your PC using a standard Save as dialog.
• Copy. Click this item to copy the image to the Clipboard so that you can paste it into another application.
• Set as. Click this item to set the image as the background of the Lock screen or the Desktop.
• Resize image. Click this item to display a Resize window that provides pixel- and percentage-based resizing, quality level, and file type choices.

• Open in File Explorer. Click this item to open File Explorer displaying the location of the image in the file system.

Tools found in the top right of the photo viewer

• Browse all your photos and videos. Click this button in the upper right of the photo viewer to open the main Photos app window.
• Edit with Designer. Click this button to open an in-app version of the image editor used by Microsoft Designer on the web. This editor offers rich AI-powered image editing capabilities separate from the native image editing features found in the Photo app’s editor experience, described below.

• Create a video with Microsoft Clipchamp. Click this button to open Clipchamp and create a new video featuring this image.
• View OneDrive in Photos.
• Previous/Next. If there are other images in the folder that contains the image you’re viewing, Photos will display “Previous” and “Next” buttons on the sides of the app window when you mouse over those areas.

Keyboard shortcut: You can also tap the Left arrow and Right arrow keys to navigate to different images in the same folder.

Tools found in the bottom left of the photo viewer

• Show/Hide Filmstrip. This button toggles a filmstrip view that appears at the bottom of the image and displays thumbnails of each image in that folder for easier navigation. You can also multi-select images in the filmstrip using a selection box that appears when you mouse over a thumbnail. You can then right-click the filmstrip to reveal a limited set of options like “Copy all” and “Create a video with Microsoft Clipchamp.”

• Add to Favorites. Click this button to add the image to your list of favorite photos.

More info: Favorites are discussed briefly later in the chapter.

• File info. Photos displays the resolution and file size of the current image next to this button, but you can click “File info” to display–and in some cases, edit–other metadata in a large pane.

Tools found in the bottom center of the photo viewer

• Visual search with Bing. This button opens a new tab in your default web browser so you can perform what’s called a “reverse image search” using the current image and find more images like it online.

• Scan text. This incredibly useful feature highlights all the text in a photo, screenshot, or other image. Then, you can right-click the image to select “Copy text,” “Select all text,” and “Search in web with Bing” options from a pop-up menu. Copied text is copied to the Windows 11 Clipboard so you can then paste it into another app, like Notepad.

Tools found in the bottom right of the photo viewer

• Zoom to actual size/Zoom to fit. By default, Photos will display images at native resolution if possible. Otherwise, it will scale the image to fit the available space. You can use this button to toggle between the native resolution and the scaled view.
• Zoom selection. This control displays a menu of preset zoom sizes you can select, like 10%, 25%, 50%, and so on.
• Zoom out, Zoom, Zoom in. This set of controls is used to zoom the image display in and out arbitrarily.

Keyboard shortcut: Type Ctrl + + (plus) to zoom in on an image, Ctrl + – (minus) to zoom out, and Ctrl + 0 to return the image to its default zoom size.

• Fullscreen. Click this item to display the image in full-screen. Tap Esc to exit this view.

Tip: Most of the options listed above can also be accessed by right-clicking the image.

Keyboard shortcut: To close the Photos photo viewer experience, just tap Esc.

Edit an image

The Photos editor experience offers a solid variety of editing tools on any PC, with an expanded selection of AI-powered tools for those with a Copilot+ PC. There are also general options related to editing in the top corners of the app:

• Top left. As you make edits to an image, you can use the “Reset,” “Undo,” and “Redo” buttons in the top left of the app window to revert (or remake) changes.
• Top right. When you’re done editing, you can use the “Save options” and “Cancel” buttons in the upper right to save the edited image, save it as another image, copy it to the Clipboard, or cancel at any time; the latter action will trigger a prompt warning that you will lose any changes you made.

Tip: The tools that require a Copilot+ PC also require you to sign in with your Microsoft account. Some of these tools may also prompt you to download an AI model the first time you access them.

Available editing tools appear in the top-center of the app and include:

• Crop. This tool is selected by default when you open the editor experience. Here, you can use the selection handles to adjust the cropping area and then crop the image accordingly. There are also rotation, aspect ratio, and flip horizontally/vertically controls at the bottom.

• Adjustment. This tool provides several light and color adjustment sliders. For example, to adjust the exposure, drag the Exposure slider to the right or left.

• Filter. Here, you can access an “Auto Enhance” button and several filters–Punch, Golden, Radiate, Warm Contrast, and many more–each of which can be fine-tuned with an Intensity slider.

• Markup. This tool provides a selection of pens, highlighter, and erasers you can use to markup an image.

• Erase. This tool uses cloud-based generative AI to help you remove unwanted elements from a photo or other image. To use it, select a brush size and then “paint” over an area you wish to remove. When you let go of the touchpad or mouse button, the AI will go to work and try to fill in the painted area in a way that makes sense for the surrounding area. You can repeat this process and adjust the brush size repeatedly as needed.

• Background. This tool uses cloud-based generative AI to blur, remove, or replace the background automatically, in the latter case using a configurable color. You can also use the “Background brush tool” toggle–which has masking and brush size and softness options–to fine-tune which areas are considered the background and which are not.

• Restyle image (Copilot+ PC only). This fascinating tool uses local, on-device generative AI to restyle the image using a text prompt. You can type this prompt yourself or use a fun set of thumbnail presets–Fantasy, Anime, Surrealism, and many more–that supply an editable prompt for you. Scroll down to the bottom of the Restyle image pane to find a creativity slider, which can be wild, and a drop-down to choose between restyling the entire image or only the background or foreground.

• Super resolution (Copilot+ PC only). If you have a lot of old and low-quality photo scans, this may be the single most useful and powerful feature in the Photos app. It increases the resolution–size–of the image using a slider with presets that range from 1x (the original size) to 8x while preserving or enhancing the image quality. Large scale choices will take more time to generate, and when it’s done, you can view the before and after versions of the image side-by-side before saving the image.

• Relight (Copilot+ PC only). This tool is new to 2026 and helps you adjust the lighting of the image by configuring its direction, color, position, and intensity. You can position three light locations over the image and then adjust the brightness, softness, and color of each individually, or you can just select a preset from a grid of thumbnails. This is perhaps one of the more confusing and complex tools in the app, and one I still struggle to understand fully.

Tip: In addition to the editing tools noted above, don’t forget that you can also use the “Edit with Designer” button in the photo viewer experience to access a lot of other AI-based editing functionality.

Manage your photo collection

While many people manage their photo collections on a phone or the web, the Photos app offers a hybrid experience with local, OneDrive, and Apple iCloud-based photo collection management capabilities. The app provides a navigation pane on the left, and you can use the misnamed “Close Navigation”/”Open Navigation” toggle at its top to collapse or expand it.

Most of the items listed in the navigation pane display a different view when selected, and a few of these views are unique to Copilot+ PCs as noted below. Available views include:

• Gallery. This default view displays your entire photo collection.

More info: The Gallery view in File Explorer works similarly, but outside the Photos app.

• Categories (Copilot+ PC only). If you have a Copilot+ PC, Photos will prompt you to enable an image categorization feature that uses local AI to scan your entire photo collection and provide four views–Identity (for photos of your driver’s license, passport, and similar documents), Notes (for photos of handwritten notes), Receipts, and Screenshots–so you can more easily find images of things that are not personal photos. The Categories view and its four sub-views appear in the navigation bar if you enable this feature.

Tip: You can enable or disable this feature at any time using the “Allow image categorization” option in Photos settings.

• Favorites. Like the similar feature in Microsoft Edge, Photos lets you mark individual photos as favorites so that you can view your favorite pictures and videos in a single location. But it’s limited to JPEG images and MP4 videos.

• Image Creator (Copilot+ PC only). This is the one item in the Photos navigation bar that doesn’t open a view. Instead, it uses a local, on-device text-to-image AI model to transform a text prompt you write into a series of images you can fine-tune using a Creativity slider and a set of filters. If you don’t like any of the first several images it creates, keep scrolling down and it will make more. You can access “Generate variations of this image” and “Save this AI-powered image” options by mousing-over any creation. And if you’re stuck for words, the main Image Creator page provides several idea-based thumbnails to help you get started.

Tip: If you save an Image Creator-made image, it will be saved to C:\Users*user-name*\Pictures\Image Creator by default.

• OneDrive. This expandable/collapsible item–which will be named as it is in File Explorer; “Paul – Personal” in my case–displays the photos and videos in OneDrive. There are sub-views for Memories and the Camera roll and Pictures folders.

• iCloud Photos. If you install the Apple iCloud app from the Microsoft Store, sign in to your Apple account, and enable the app’s iCloud Photos feature, your iCloud-based photo collection–including photos, videos, and screenshots–will appear in this view.

• This PC. This view expands and contracts to display the local folders used by the Photos app. By default, there will be a single sub-item, for your Pictures folder. But you may also see other items below This PC, including those for removable storage devices.

Import photos and videos from your phone or another device

Photos lets you import photos, other images, and videos from a phone, camera, or other removable storage device that’s connected to your PC via USB.

To do so, connect the device, open Photos, and click the “Import” button. A drop-down menu will appear displaying a list of connected devices.

Select the device from which you want to import content. Photos will scan the device and display all the photos, videos, and other content you can import. This can take a long time if there are many photos on the device.

Tip: You will also see a new External Devices section appear in the navigation pane below the This PC section. The device you connected will be displayed there and selected.

Once Photos is done loading the available items, you can determine which to import using the “Select new” and “Select all” toggles and by selecting or deselecting individual items. When you’re ready click the “Add # items” button, and Photos will prompt you to choose a location in the file system for the imported files.

Tip: What you can’t do is determine how the imported files will be named, as they will retain their original file names. Nor can you specify a folder organizational hierarchy. It’s just a raw dump of the files.