Windows 10 Technical Preview 2: Photos App Updated with Improved Auto-Enhance

Microsoft quietly updated the Photos app in Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 last Friday. And it is a testament to the minor nature of that update, perhaps, that no one even noticed it happened. But the auto-enhancement improvements are worth knowing about.

As I noted in Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 App Focus: Photos, this app will eventually be pretty great, offering important features like automatically curated albums based on date, time and location and a folder view, those features were not available in the original WTP2 release. Sadly, they’re not available now, either. Instead, this latest update—which you should have received silently by now if you are running WTP2—includes very minor changes.

These include.

Auto-enhance improvements. Microsoft says it has “fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm” in the auto-enhance feature, which you can really see if you zoom in on a photo. As you can see here, auto-enhance (enabled on the left) can make a big difference.

Performance improvements. Microsoft has improved the performance of the app, “specifically around drawing thumbnails in list view.”  The company says that most people should see significant improvements in how fast their page of thumbnails is drawn, and I can report that this is indeed the case, though I still see some thumbnail issues.

Stability improvements. The new app includes fixes that should greatly improve stability for the customers that had issues with the original version.

So, nothing major. But I like to see Microsoft issues updates like this, and I hope to see a lot more of this in the days and weeks ahead.