Microsoft is Adding a Designer Button to the Windows 11 Photos App

Microsoft announced today that it is lightly integrating the Windows 11 Photos app with its AI-powered Designer graphic design web app.

“Today we are introducing the ability to send an image from the Photos app to Microsoft Designer,” Microsoft’s Mala Srivatsa writes in the announcement post. “This update is available on Windows 11 to start, and is currently limited to users within the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, India, and New Zealand. We are starting to roll this out to Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels.”

Since this integration is rather light—a single new button in the Photos app’s toolbar—it’s unclear why this warranted a standalone announcement post. Perhaps this is the beginning of some deeper integration that will be revealed at Build next month or at some later time. Or maybe everything AI-related is news these days.

Whatever the reason, here’s what’s happening.

When you’re working with a single photo or other image in the Photos app in Windows 11, you’ll soon be able to click a new Designer button to open that image in Microsoft Designer in your default web browser. From there, you can apply templates, add visuals, and use Designer’s AI tools to further personal the image. And … I think that’s it. I don’t believe you can round-robin it back to Photos or maintain any sense of workflow. It’s basically just an “Open with” button.

For this to work, you will need Photos version 2024.11040.16001.0 or higher, and you’ll have to sign in to Designer using your Microsoft account. As noted, this is rolling out first to the Windows Insider Canary and Dev channels first, and it will then make its way to other Insider channels and the stable General Availability channel at some unspecified date.