Microsoft is splitting the Windows 11 Photos app in two. The Photos app you use today is being renamed Photo Viewer and will only open and edit individual images, while a new Photos app, which is the web-based OneDrive Photos, takes over as a Gallery for pictures on your PC, OneDrive, and iCloud. Add the Gallery in File Explorer, and Windows 11 now has three ways to look at your photos.
Microsoft started rolling out the new Photos experience to Windows Insiders on October 15, 2026, and I’ve been using both apps on my Insider PC running build 26340.9616 since then. It works, though it doesn’t feel like one joined-up Photos app anymore.
Windows 11’s Photos app is now called Photo Viewer
For existing users, the new name will be the first thing they notice. The Photos app isn’t going away; it’s becoming Photo Viewer. You can still use it to open images and move between them, but you won’t find it in the Start menu or installed apps list.
Instead, Photo Viewer opens when you open an image file from File Explorer or the desktop. If you somehow open it without a file, you get a blank “Nothing to show here yet” screen asking you to drop an image or browse for one.
Photo Viewer when invoked without opening an image. Credit: Windows Latest
We confirmed the name change from the app Settings page. It lists “Photo Viewer” with a new teal icon and version 2608.1401.11.0, along with the usual options for app theme, delete confirmation, mouse wheel, and zoom. There’s still an “Add account” prompt, plus a toggle to add a watermark to images created or edited with Copilot.
Photo Viewer opens images faster and keeps the details close
The redesigned Viewer can open individual photos quickly and is easier to move between them. Microsoft says it opens images 15% faster on average and up to 30% faster for HEIC files. HDR looks better, SVG files are supported, and the useful details and controls are nearby without getting in the way of the picture.
A filmstrip at the bottom shows the other images in the folder, so you can jump between them without going back to File Explorer.
The Info panel is more useful than I expected. Apart from the file name, date, size, and location, it has shortcuts to resize the image, copy its path, run a Visual Search or open the file location, and there’s a color histogram at the bottom if you care about exposure.
Microsoft also kept the cleaner toolbar it rolled out last month. Shortcuts that were usually at the top are now in an “Open with” menu, which shows File Explorer, the Gallery in the new Photos app and Clipchamp, or any other app you choose.
Photo Viewer gets a rebuilt native editor with Relight
The new native Editor covers the basics, including cropping, enhancing, repairing and stylizing images. Microsoft says it loads 25% faster than the previous Photos app in their own tests and can edit HDR, HEIC and WebP files. It certainly feels quicker in my testing, although I can’t say whether it really is 25% faster.
There are a few more interesting tools too, including object removal under Repair and Relight, which lets you fix the lighting or simply try a different look. Relight used to be limited to Copilot+ PCs, but Microsoft is now bringing it to all Windows 11 devices. The Editor is built into Photo Viewer, so you click Edit on any image to get to it.
The new Photos app is OneDrive Photos with a Gallery for PC, OneDrive and iCloud
The new Photos app highlights an all-new Gallery, bringing together pictures and videos from your PC, OneDrive and Apple iCloud. You can browse by date, search in everyday language, filter for friends and family, create and share albums, and revisit OneDrive-backed memories through Moments. Natural language search for photos stored on your PC needs a Copilot+ PC, though.
You don’t need a Microsoft account to use OneDrive Photos with local files. It works with a local Windows account, and you can browse local and iCloud content without signing in to OneDrive. Importing files won’t automatically upload them, either. Anything stored on your device will still be available offline. Microsoft says Gallery is faster to launch and scroll through as well.
On my PC, the app shows OneDrive and iCloud Photos as two folders. Clicking iCloud Photos asks you to install iCloud for Windows, and the prompt makes a point of saying your photos “stay on this PC without backing up to OneDrive.”
OneDrive Photos isn’t new to us. I and several others uncovered it in leaks around a year ago. Then, earlier this year, it started appearing on Windows PCs without any warning from Microsoft. Jeff Teper, who leads Microsoft 365 collaborative apps, later admitted the rollout “went more broadly than it should have,” and Microsoft promised an uninstall option. Now we finally have some context as to what that rollout was all about.
OneDrive Photos will replace the current Photos app on the Start menu, and on my PC, the new blue Photos icon took the old app’s pinned spot.
The change also shows up in the app manifest’s migration details. The package, Microsoft.OneDrive.Photos version 26.200.1013.1, runs through OneDrive.App.exe and has a “desktopAppMigration” entry pointing to Microsoft.Windows.Photos, the current app, and two codenamed packages, Honeygold and Honeycrisp.
A comment in the file says pin migration only happens on Windows builds it has been validated on, and the minimum version listed is 10.0.19042, which is Windows 10 version 20H2, so the package could install on Windows 10, at least on paper.
Basically, Windows now has a slightly strange mix. Viewer and Editor are native, while Gallery is a web-based experience delivered through the OneDrive app, which runs on WebView2. Ironically, Microsoft keeps talking about native apps for Windows 11, and the part of Photos you’ll spend the most time browsing in is the one that isn’t native.
Photos, Photo Viewer, and File Explorer’s Gallery overlap too much
I still find the whole setup a bit odd. Windows 11 will effectively have two photo apps with overlapping features: Photos for browsing a collection, and Photo Viewer for opening and editing individual images. And that’s before you count the Gallery view already built into File Explorer.
Each option has a purpose, but the differences won’t be obvious to everyone. Microsoft may be trying to make each task simpler. Even so, plenty of users will probably wonder whether they should open Photos, Photo Viewer or Gallery in File Explorer, and the “Gallery” in Photo Viewer’s Open with menu doesn’t help, since it opens the new Photos app and not File Explorer’s Gallery.
When will the new Photos and Photo Viewer roll out?
The new experiences began rolling out to Windows Insiders on October 15, 2026. Microsoft says they’ll reach everyone on Windows 11 later this year, but they haven’t yet announced a firm date, so the update will probably arrive gradually as testing continues.
The basic idea is simple: open a picture in Photo Viewer, or browse your collection in Photos. Whether Windows really needs yet another way to get to your photographs is another matter.
