Latest Microsoft Photos Update Takes Story Remix to the Next Level

Microsoft is today rolling out a new update to the Photos app in Windows 10. The latest update brings a much-awaited feature for the Story Remix experience within the app, which Microsoft showed off during the initial announcement of Story Remix.

The feature, Choose a Star, lets you select the “star” of your story. When you create a new video using clips and photos, the app will automatically be able to detect the prominent faces from the selected media, and then let you choose a star. Once you choose the star of a video and remix it, the app will automatically make changes to your video and build the video around the selected star.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

“With today’s update, you can take your filmmaking to the next level by selecting yourself or nominating someone to be the star in your automatically generated creation. Photos will then build a video around the person you choose, pulling in relevant photos and videos, zooming in on your star, and choosing an appropriate theme,” Microsoft’s Ashlie Little said in a blog post.

Microsoft is rolling out the new feature for Photos to all users running the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update today, make sure to update the app from the Microsoft Store to get the new feature.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 11 comments

  • judgejewelz

    25 January, 2018 - 2:56 pm

    <p>Well I've just about had enough with Microsoft Photos. After the most recent Windows 10 update my Photos app has completely scrambled my photos; they're now all over the place. Microsoft Photos, my photos taken over a year ago were not – despite what you think – taken this January.</p><p><br></p><p>If I can't rely on Photos to do the simplest of tasks reliably (i.e. keep photos in order) then I simply won't use the application; unfortunately this rather tarnishes the overall experience of using Windows 10.</p>

    • IanYates82

      Premium Member
      27 January, 2018 - 4:30 am

      <blockquote><a href="#240421"><em>In reply to judgejewelz:</em></a></blockquote><p>I had to deliberately break my OneDrive file sync to stop the silly Photos app from downloading the entire several hundred GB of photos every day to my laptop. I never launch the Photos app, and even told it, via its settings page, to stop linking with OneDrive.</p><p>In the end I reset OneDrive but left folders on my PC for my Camera Roll folder. OneDrive sees that as a conflict – I'm just leaving it unresolved permanently. So far that's working, but it's a pretty poor fix. Trying to just exclude that folder from this PC didn't work last time so I'm reluctant to try that again. 4 (3x other folders tricked the same way) little sync errors permanently showing up isn't too big a price to pay.</p>

  • Rob_Wade

    25 January, 2018 - 5:37 pm

    <p>Uh, yeah. I tried that out. Wasn't really impressed. I'll stick to actually using a video editing program. This is probably fine for soccer moms with limited time, imagination or decent video editor.</p>

    • warren

      25 January, 2018 - 7:03 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#240494"><em>In reply to Rob_Wade:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>Nothing wrong with that. That's where the iLife suite got its start, too.</p><p><br></p><p>Of course, that was 15 years ago……….</p><p><br></p>

      • Ugur

        27 January, 2018 - 3:07 am

        <blockquote><a href="#240511"><em>In reply to warren:</em></a><em> this actually has some very cool features the iLife suite doesn't have.</em></blockquote><blockquote>Though the iLife suite did allow one to export and reuse things better in between.</blockquote><blockquote>Of course meanwhile they removed or replaced most of the iLife suite apps, in several cases with ones which are worse/more limited so yeah..</blockquote><blockquote>but i better don't get into how things are getting worse and worse on macs, because that would take a while.</blockquote><p><br></p>

  • Mike Cramer

    25 January, 2018 - 9:25 pm

    <p>Neat. Obviously this is aimed at users like my sister, who likes to create and share video/photo projects with friends and family. Not everyone is a jaded pro.</p>

    • Ugur

      27 January, 2018 - 3:04 am

      <blockquote><a href="#240537"><em>In reply to Donkey_Gas:</em></a><em> if they would add a few of the things i listed in my comment, it may even become an app used in between by pros, too for smaller projects. They just limit themselves without good reason by not including some standard desktop application features like save, copy, duplicate projects files etc and other such features someone who has more longer term value in a project would expect.</em></blockquote><p><br></p>

  • SvenJ

    25 January, 2018 - 10:08 pm

    <p>Bring on the flaming soccer balls.</p>

  • Ugur

    27 January, 2018 - 12:48 am

    <p>I have to say some of the added features to the Photos app are actually really awesome, so i at least look forward to trying this new feature soon, too.</p><p><br></p><p>I create both art and code (most times applications, games etc), but usually lean more on the development and game/ui/app (and interaction) design than graphics design but for a recent contest where it was about creating a short real time rendered 3d movie i made that in Unity and then put my clips of the recording for upload to youtube together in the Photos app and was quite impressed.</p><p><br></p><p>Initially i just used the Photos app because i didn't have my video editing software on that computer and had few time left at the end of the contest and so it just seemed like a workable way to put together a few clips quickly.</p><p>But then i gave the background music feature a try and it was unexpectedly pretty impressive.</p><p><br></p><p>The way the background music thing works in the Photos app is that it has a bunch of music types/tracks one can choose from and it puts it on the video one is putting together out of several clips, like many other video editing apps allow one to do, so at first superficial glance nothing new.</p><p><br></p><p>But then as i browsed through their available music selection i noticed that it does actually apply the music in clever way, where it gets not just how long a movie is and applies start and end portions of the music automatically but also somehow adjusts the parts of the music to fit in feel some to what is shown throughout the movie.</p><p>Suddenly i caught myself playing around with that feature for an hour because it was so cool to just browse their whole music library and see how it applied each track on my video. Then i just chose the one that fit the mood i wanted to convey best.</p><p>It's very cool how it adjusts the music for your video.</p><p>I don't know if it does this just based on the amount of movement between the frames or color palettes used in pictures or what exactly, but somehow it made the music fit very well to my movie.</p><p><br></p><p>I tried various other apps before which try to fit a music track automatically to your video but this did a so much better job at it, i was really actually impressed, something i don't remember when it happened to me with MS made software the last time.</p><p>(Nothing against the better ones among MS software, usually they are just way more what i totally expect them to be)</p><p><br></p><p>I would totally use this again for smaller one of things in between.</p><p><br></p><p>Now what is sad about the functionality of the app is that while it has these very cool new age features, it sadly lacks many of the old age features that if there would elevate this app way higher and would make it a good choice for more in depth and also longer term and more serious projects, too.</p><p><br></p><p>What i mean with this is:</p><p>-very cool it has such AI/machine learning image recognition and sense making auto suggestions/solutions providing sides.</p><p><br></p><p>But where it is lacking is that it misses old age features like for example just being able to save, copy, duplicate, move your project and project files for example.</p><p>Something such basic, but it wants to push mobile app style auto saving and project keeping on you and that you should not worry about where your project is, what your project file/folder is etc.</p><p>Nor much about how your project files are all in one location or movable together for later usage or archiving etc.</p><p>Well, great up to when you want to use our project on a different machine (and not use cloud services), or just something basic like duplicate your project to use it as base for another one.</p><p>So basically any file explorer/right click/file management etc type actions one would totally have in a classic windows/desktop app are pretty much all missing, which is really a bummer, which totally would block me from ever using this in a serious project i have to work on longer term or rely on being able to have archived and used somewhere else, maybe together with other people etc.</p><p>No, i can't just rely on having it automagically kept safe local or on enforced cloud service usage for any work project.</p><p>(As example: google docs allows to use cloud functionality for being able to access all your docs on any device and have the work auto synced etc, but it still also allows one to download it as file like word doc so it has the best of both worlds)</p><p><br></p><p>Likewise also giving more info and hover info is missing here.</p><p>Like for example when one adds new clips it does actually not show the clip name anywhere on it nor is there hover with the mouse over it to show the name on it or similar.</p><p>Meaning if one has several clips which have sorta similar in preview picture looking content, one can't know which clip is which without playing them constantly, which is just stupid.</p><p><br></p><p>Then also there are no proper panel/window managment features like just being able to drag around or resize panels of the app freely.</p><p><br></p><p>I could go on but i guess meanwhile clear:</p><p><br></p><p>No reason to loose the functionality one expects on a desktop OS over a mobile OS.</p><p>On a phone/tablet for quick on the go editing, it is more understandable when there is no file/project hierarchy, one doesn't even deal with project files etc manually or all such other things, but on a desktop OS i expect to be able to copy, move, duplicate etc stuff as i please and all the other features i expect from a mature desktop OS app.</p><p>I feel like that is a bit the issue with a lot of UWP type apps, they loose too much of features one expects on a mature desktop OS while trying to make all new; while adding many cool new features, too much of what one expects and should be able to expect is lost on other ends right now.</p><p><br></p><p>I hope they address these things, because yeah, some of the clever stuff like the ai driven music applying on videos is very cool and shows where such apps are going. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC