Back in the day, the Photo Gallery app that came with the Windows Live bundle was actually a very good photo organizer. With it, you could navigate folders, slice and dice, tag, organize and find thousands of photos in almost any way imaginable. The editing options were also pretty decent for the average amateur user.
These days, OneDrive does a great job of uploading all your full resolution photos from your phone, both iOs and Android. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, with a full terabyte of storage, it’s a great place to keep an entire collection of tens of thousands of photos and possibly the best value in online storage when the rest of O365 is considered part of the bundle.
Until you get to the Windows 10 Photos app. It’s a real stinker! It takes up huge amounts of resources. Navigating folders is nearly impossible. Organizing images in any order other than date is a chore. There’s no manual tagging functionality at all. The suggested tags are mostly a joke. On the plus side, the editing options are OK, i guess.
I believe MS is really missing the boat on photos. Having thousands of images in one service makes that service, whatever it is, incredibly “sticky” for the user. If they overhauled the Photos app, even to just the full functionality of the old Photo Gallery app, I think thousands of users would rejoice.
Meantime, I do keep a copy of the Windows Live bundle around and use the Photo Gallery app. But I’m guessing that, some day, one of the windows 10 updates will kill that option for good.
I’d love to hear Paul and Brad’s take on this.
willc
<p>Just use Google Photos instead, it’s far superior. And Google actually cares about consumers, so it’s constantly being improved.</p><p><br></p>