Restore Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10  

Hi, when I ran your reg file and tried to open windows photo viewer this comes up and in default programs it shows it as photoviewer.dll, not even windows photo viewer. Any thoughts? Thanks

This didn't work for me. I downloaded the reg.file for all accounts then went to set default programs. There, it was listed so I set as default but I don't see it when I open a photo or even "open with"

Under Windows Photo Viewer in the program directory it has "Imaging Devices" inside the folder....

mkcar said:

This didn't work for me. I downloaded the reg.file for all accounts then went to set default programs. There, it was listed so I set as default but I don't see it when I open a photo or even "open with"

Under Windows Photo Viewer in the program directory it has "Imaging Devices" inside the folder....

Sorry, I downloaded "undo" restore first time by mistake. All sorted and restored now. Thanks ;-)

Dear Shawn,

Some time ago, after upgrading from W7 to W10, I followed your steps to bring back Windows Photo Viewer to all users in W10. It works, great! Thx.

However, Outlook 2016 seems to not fully be happy with the solution. Whenever I double click an TXT, DOC or PDF email attachment it opens it with the right application (in my case NotePad, Word 2016 and Foxit PDF Reader respectively).
With an JPG attachment, however Outlook 2016 keeps asking what application to use. Selecting Windows Photo Viewer from the list that Outlook presents to me and marking "Always use this app to open JPG files" doesn't help.

This screenshot shows how Outlook presents the attachments to me (on which I doubleclick to open them):



While I read on different ocassions (also Outlook forums) that Outlook relies on file associations made for Windows and having verified that doubleclicking a JPG file directly from Windows Explorer DOES start Windows Photo Viewer right away, I wonder what the problem could be.
Should there be additional register mods to make it work for Outlook 2016? Would you perhaps have any clue?

Thanx in advance for any reaction posted,

Steijn van Essen
From i8088 to i7-980X in 25 years and still waiting ...

Set Windows Photo Viewer as the default in default programs after the registry change. It was my experience that even after the registry change, I had to do that. The default was stuck on 10 of 12 defaults. A computer restart may help as well. Then the "Always use this app to open JPG files" should work and stay active. Good luck.

Hi Brink, thanks for your excellent guide :)

I'm having a hell of a time finalizing my new windows 10 image (using LTSB version) where there is no "photos" app and images/pictures are opened with paint as default.

I've used your guide and been able to then select the windows photo viewer in the default apps settings or open images with windows photo viewer.

However, here's where the issue starts. Each time a new user logs in, the photo viewer is no longer the default app. Is there a way that this can be set automatically upon any time a new user logs in? Perhaps running a reg file or batch file?

It's not really going to be ideal to ask each user to manually set this setting from the default app list whenever they log in to a different computer.

I've tried setting it in the following locations to no avail:

1. Local pc gpo (default file association file)
2. Domain gpo (default file association file)
3. Setting it in the default app setting and specifying in a sysprep unattend.xml to copy settings to a default profile.

Really looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards.