What happened to Microsoft Photo Viewer?

It doesn’t come with Windows automatically any more; it’s part of Windows Live Essentials. You have to install that package to get the Microsoft Photo Gallery.

However, I always found it….well, “lacking” is the kindest word that comes to mind when I think of the viewer that MS offers. I find XnView to be far superior, even for simple viewing. If you ever even do a simple pan/zoom then you will see why Microsoft’s offering is meager at best by comparison.

Does it show up if you do this? I couldn’t find it in the Start Menu (RIP) but it shows if I click a picture and select the preview dropdown.

And that is in a fresh VM of Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Windows Live Essentials wasn’t installed.

@johnpowell Ah, yes, I can see it there. Thank you!
@jerv What led me the question was that I was working on a laptop that I wanted to reserve for music and documents (like Word) mostly, keeping photos to a minimum. But I got a large photo that I wanted to resize quickly and email, without having to load new software, and I remembered that this was quick and easy to do with MS Photo Viewer. However, it seems that the new Photo Viewer doesn’t have this capability anymore. So, thank you for the XnView link. I’ll take a look at it.

I liked @jerv‘s suggestion of XnView; it’s not bad. But I still prefer IrfanView as my default viewer.

I totally agree with him regarding the shortcomings of Microsoft Picture Viewer. I can’t even imagine why they bother to keep it around, with better viewers all around, and freely available.

To resize in XnView, just hit Shift-S

@CWOTUS XnView vs Irfanview is a heated debate in some circles. The Irfanview supporters insist that XnView stole features, and that their accusations “must” be true because XnView hasn’t explicitly denied them, while the XnView side… just quietly ignores the screaming, secure in the knowledge that XnView can do things Irfanview can’t.
Still, those two are always brought up in any “Best image viewer” discussion, and both are worth a look. Which really is better? That seems to be a personal preference thing.

@jerv @CWOTUS I can see that MS Photo Viewer is now more worthless than ever, since they’ve crippled it by removing the resize function!

If you don’t want to install new software for resizing your pics you can use a web-based editor instead. Personally I use Pixlr, but there are loads of others to choose from.

If I do what @johnpowell said, it turns out that there is also Microsoft Live Photo Gallery. Now, this does have a resize function and appears to be Microsoft’s follow-up to Photo Viewer, similar to the way Wordpad is supposedly an improvement over Notepad. One wonders, however, why Microsoft still keeps the old Notepad and Photo Viewer around.

And @downtide, thanks for the Pixlr tip. Neat!!

I stopped questioning Microsoft after Win8 and the Xbox One fiasco. It’s obvious that they’ve lost their minds.

@jerv Just tried XnView. What a great app! And @downtide Pixlr is nice, too! Thanks, folks!