Photos (Windows)
photo browser included with Windows
Microsoft Photos is an image viewer and image organizer developed by Microsoft. It was first included in Windows 8 in 2012 as a functional replacement for Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Photo Gallery. In 2017, it replaced Windows Movie Maker.
In 2024, Photos transitioned from the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to the Windows App SDK. The app began running in the background at Windows' startup in order to improve the app startup speed, being also integrated into File Explorer's context menu.
Features
Photo management
Photos is a single-instance app that can organize digital photos and videos in its gallery into albums. The default view is Gallery (previously called Collection in Windows 10), which sorts media by date. Users can also view items by Folder (previously Album) and add items to the existing ones. The folder view shows both auto-generated and user-generated albums. The folder view displays files based on their location in the file system or on OneDrive. Users can choose what folders are displayed and which files are placed in albums.
The public source identifies “Photos (Windows)” as photo browser included with Windows. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Photos, Windows and photo.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26328552. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2017 and 2024.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Photos (Windows)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.