Note: A big thanks to nexus over at TenForums for locating the required registry settings.Īnd remember-this step is only necessary if you’re using a fresh Windows 10 system. You can always leave it available and just associate your image files with a different app. Of course, there’s no real need to deactivate it in the Registry. And if you ever want to deactivate it, just run the “Deactivate Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10 (Default)” hack. Run the “Activate Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10” hack to create the keys and values in the Registry and activate Photo Viewer. Download and unzip the following file:Īctivate-Windows-Photo-Viewer-on-Windows-10 To make things easy, we’ve put together a Registry hack you can use to make these edits quickly because they’re a little cumbersome to make manually. We’ll need to add the same registry entries that were present on Windows 7 and 8.1, and are still present on systems that upgraded from those old versions of Windows. Step One: Enable Photo Viewer in the Registry And after you do that, you can set it as your default photo app. So, how do you get Photo Viewer back? By firing up our old friend Registry Editor, of course. Photo Viewer is actually part of a DLL file named “PhotoViewer.dll” and doesn’t have a separate executable file associated with it. exe file to associate them with Photo Viewer, either. You also can’t simply point image files at a specific. RELATED: What Are DLL Files, and Why Is One Missing From My PC? Open it up and you can only make Photo Viewer the default association for. The old “Default Programs” Control Panel app isn’t much help, either. If you navigate to the Default apps pane in Settings, you won’t even see Photo Viewer as an option. RELATED: How to Set Your Default Apps in Windows 10 Microsoft really wants you to open all those image files in its new Photos app, instead.

Those keys are kept in place if you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but they aren’t created during the installation of Windows 10.

For whatever reason, Microsoft opted not to include the Registry keys that enable access to Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10.

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