Tips to Get the Most Out of Windows 10's New Photo App

Windows 10 includes a powerful yet intuitive photos app. Here's how to use it.

When Windows 8 launched, it included a Photos app that opened your images by default. The only problem: It could hardly do anything with them. Windows 10 rights a lot of Windows 8's wrongs, and the Photos app is one noteworthy example. The new Photos app includes image correction and enhancement, as well as organization capabilities. It's much closer to something like Mac OS X's Photos app than to Paint. Let's take a closer look at this capable new part of Windows 10's toolkit.

Import and OrganizeWhen you pop a memory card (such as an SD card) into a USB slot in your PC, Windows 10 asks you how it should handle that action, using what app. Choosing Import using Photos makes sense. Next, you see a screen confirming the import, like this:

I'm somewhat disappointed with this importer, since it doesn't have the Windows 7 "Import pictures and videos" feature's ability to let you apply keyword tags, choose a save location, and erase the card after import. The importer does, however, apply auto-correct (which you can turn off in settings) and hides exact duplicates. It also organizes newly imported photos by date and creates a Collection for the new import. This lets you use Cortana to call up photos from certain date ranges, so you can say, "Hey Cortana, show me photos from last summer!"

You can also tap on a date to show all past months to quickly zoom to past photos. If you have a Windows Phone set to automatically save photos to OneDrive, your photos will be in the Windows 10 app automatically, as will any folders you add to the app's watched list. The interface is pretty well suited to touch interactions: You can tap on a photo's large thumbnail to open it, unpinch to zoom, and navigate back and forth through all photos with a swipe.

But as for more granular types of photo organization—by keyword, geolocation, or contents such as faces—the Photos app is sorely wanting. OneDrive's photo view has all of this, as does Mac OS X's Photos app. I'm pretty certain that, since Microsoft has the technology (even technology for automatically categorizing photos by their contents similar to Flickr's Magic View), these capabilities will show up in the Windows Photos app at some point.

What you can do now is organize your photos into Albums. Albums are automatically created for images from certain sources, such as your camera roll, saved pictures you've edited, and screenshots. Like Google Photos, the Windows 10 Photos app also creates Albums for you; for example if you import a bunch of photos of a friend at the beach it may create one, but it won't include all images.

Edit and EnhanceThe app in its current state has a much stronger story around actually editing and enhancing your photos than it does for organizing them. Tap the pencil icon when viewing any photo, and you see Photos's many editing capabilities. These come in five categories, chosen from buttons along the left: Basic fixes, Filters, Light, Color, and Effects.

Basic fixes include auto-enhance, rotation, cropping, straightening, red-eye correction, and retouching. The auto-enhance button usually punched up shadows and color saturation in my testing, and I was impressed that it actually leveled the horizon. The red-eye tool made easy work of effectively removing that bugaboo of flash photography, and likewise Retouch smoothed away blemishes convincingly. And I should mention that just having a Shadows adjuster is a real plus in my book, this lets you, for example, bring out faces darkened by a hat or a bright background.

The controls for adjustments such as Brightness, Contrast, Highlights, and Shadows use a circular dial that lets you dial up or down the adjustment easily whether you're using a touch screen or mouse/trackpad. The same hold for the crop and straighten tools, which use large round handles to drag the image box around.

The included effect filters are not quite up to what you get in apps like Instagram or Adobe Photoshop Express: There are just six of them, with one black-and-white option. They're effective, but the app offers two more tools in its Effects page—vignette and selective focus. The first gives a photo's central subject prominence by fading out the edges either to white or black. The second can also highlight a subject by blurring the area outside of a circle or oval you select. You even get five settings from Strongest to Weakest to adjust the effect.

Save and ShareWhen you're done editing a photo, you can either update it or save a copy. At the most immediate level, Photos has a button that will start playing a slideshow of your collection. An odd thing about this feature, though, is that you can only start it from an individual photo view, rather than from a group of selected photo thumbnails.

For sharing further abroad, you can tap the Share button to open a panel populated by any apps that can accept photos, including Mail, Facebook, and Twitter (assuming you have those apps installed). Helpful for this kind of sharing is the app's multiple selection button, so you can select a bunch of photos to slap up on Facebook in one shot.

Photo FinishThe Photos app is a marked step up from Windows 8's limited version, especially when it comes to photo adjustment, editing, and enhancement. It still falls short of OS X's Photos, which offers organizational features like keyword tagging, face recognition, and geo-location of photos. But I'm pretty confident that Microsoft will add those features, since it's shown it has the technology in other software, such as OneDrive and the earlier Windows Live Photo Gallery. For a quick-and-dirty photo viewer and fixer, the Windows 10 Photos app will serve most purposes, but don't forget, Windows can run any of the most powerful photo editing software you can name, if your needs go beyond its capabilities.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web... More »

Login or Register

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

blog comments powered by Disqus State Country

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service

Source: Tips to Get the Most Out of Windows 10's New Photo App