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The menu displays the Microsoft account you’re currently using, offers you the option of refreshing the Photos Live Tile with random photos, and lets you select the source from which Photos pulls images and video. The Options menu is the nerve center of Photos. You exercise most of the control you have over Photos from the Options menu. Opening Search while you’re inside the Photos app will cause the default search to run through Photos, but you can change that arrangement by tapping a different search area.
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The Search function works the way you’d expect it to: Bring up the Charms bar by swiping in from the right side of the screen (or by moving your mouse to the right-hand corners of the screen) and click Search to search your PC for a specific file name. The Photos interface is spartan, but a few useful features lie buried in the Charms bar.
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Sure, you can download the free Windows Essentials Photo Gallery tool (which functions in much the same way that the old Photo Viewer did), but it’s a desktop app, so Windows 8 RT users are out of luck.
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Even the rudimentary Windows Photo Viewer that came bundled with every copy of Windows 7 allowed you to rotate, crop, and rename your photos, so it’s vexing that the Photos app doesn’t include similar functions. Photos currently offers no options for editing, resizing, or rotating photos, and that’s an embarrassing omission by Microsoft.
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Photos does a great job of automatically pulling images from specific services (like Facebook or SkyDrive), but it doesn’t give advanced users much control over how to load images into Photos or how to edit and control such content once it’s there.Īs it stands, the Photos app doesn’t offer enough options for editing your photos.
If you want to edit images and you’re using Windows 8 on a PC instead of a mobile device, the Windows 8 Photos app pales in comparison to several more-useful image management apps that you can download for free. Photos is functional and pretty, but it’s not very powerful. Though Photos isn’t quite as good as a dedicated wireless media streaming system-such as AirPlay or even YouTube mobile device pairing-the feature works well if you have the necessary hardware. If you have an Xbox 360 or a home-theater PC hooked up to your HDTV, for example, you can easily select a slideshow or video in your Photos app, open the Windows 8 Charms bar, and use the Devices charm to output your media to your TV. Photos also capitalizes on the sharing features built into Windows 8 by letting you display photos, slideshows, and videos on connected devices via the Devices charm. The home screen of the Photos app lets you browse through all of your photos stored across multiple devices and services. If you just need a slick platform for browsing through your photos and videos, the Photos app is a reasonable option. It’s a small but welcome luxury, especially if you’re fed up with squinting at image tiles or the preview pane in Windows 7. When you zoom out, you’ll notice that Photos shrinks your images to the size of a thumbnail, algorithmically cropping and orienting each thumbnail based on the components of the image. Tap an album to open it, swipe back and forth between images, or pinch to zoom out and see an entire album at a glance. Navigating through your photos feels intuitive. If you’re using Windows 8 on a tablet that has a high-quality screen, launching the Photos app transforms your device into a slick photo album that lets you swipe seamlessly back and forth through images from your DSLR camera, Facebook, SkyDrive account, and other PCs on your network. Photos does an adequate job of pulling your photos from disparate devices and services, organizing them, and presenting them to you in a pleasant, easy-to-navigate interface.