The Photos app in Windows 10 is perfect for browsing your snapshots, sharing and editing. Roland Waddilove presents his favourite tips
1 Browse Collections
If you want to browse all your photos and see them arranged in chronological order, select ‘Collection’ in the left panel. At the top is the month, and below are photos grouped by the dates they were taken. Spin the mouse wheel to scroll up and down through the photos.
The month is a clickable link, and it displays a list of months and years. You can quickly select another month or spin the mouse wheel to scroll the list and go back several years and select a month. This is a quick way to jump to photos from years ago without having to scroll through them all.
2 Apply Bulk Actions
In Collections view, click the Select icon in the top-right corner of the Photos app. Tickboxes on the photos are used to select them. Explorer tricks do not work here, so you can’t lasso multiple photos, and you can’t click one then Shift+click another to select all those between. What you can do is click the Select link above a day’s photos. So if you had a number of photos taken on 10th April, you could select them all with one click. After selecting photos, icons appear in the top-right corner enabling you to copy or delete them all with one click.
3 Share Your Photos
Your photos can be shared on social websites, in emails and instant messaging straight from the Photos app. This is a great way to show off your latest snapshots to friends. Select one or more photos and then click the Share button that appears in the top-right corner of the app window.
This opens Windows 10’s sharing panel on the right side of the screen. The options that appear here depend on the apps you have installed. If you have the Facebook app, then you can post the selected photos on Facebook; if you have Twitter, then you can include a photo in a tweet; and you can send photos using the Mail app or Facebook Messenger and others if you have them.
4 Share Photo Albums
In addition to sharing photos on social sites, you can also share whole albums on the web. Select ‘Albums’ on the left and then click an album to open it. Click the Share button at the top of the window or below the last photo in the album. Photos offers to upload all the photos to OneDrive and then creates a shareable link that you can give to people or post on the web.
5 Automatically Enhance Photos
Photos can automatically enhance poor images to make them look better. This has the advantage of showing your snapshots in the best possible way. This is great when you want to show them to friends. However, the enhancements are not saved, and you don’t see the photos as they really are. If you want to use the editing functions, you should turn off the automatic enhancement feature so you can see which photos need enhancing. Then select and edit them.
Click Settings at the bottom of the left panel and at the top either turn on or turn off ‘Automatically enhance your photos’.
6 Customise The Tile
Many Start menu tiles can display live information, and Photos is no different, but you can choose what is displayed. Right-click the Photos tile on the Start menu and select Resize > Large so there’s space to show a photo. Then right-click it again and select More > Turn on live tile.
Open the Photos app and click the settings icon in the bottom-left corner. Under Tile, choose either ‘Recent photos’ or ‘A single photo’. If you choose the second option, click the Select photo button below and find the photo you want to show on the Photos tile. The Recent photos option makes a mini slideshow on the Start menu tile.
7 Add Folders
If all your photos are in the Pictures folder, the Photos app can find and display them. What about photos stored elsewhere, such as other folders on the disk, another partition or USB drive? To enable the Photos app to show the images in other locations, go to Settings and click the plus button under Sources. Find and select the other folders containing images.
Below the Source section is OneDrive and it’s particularly useful to turn on the option to show pictures stored in your online storage. Get the OneDrive app for your iPhone or Android phone and turn on the option to automatically upload photos. Each photo you take on your phone is automatically uploaded to OneDrive and then it appears in the Photos app on your PC.
There’s an option in the OneDrive section to show photos from the Pictures folder only, which is where your phone uploads photos, or to include images from all folders on OneDrive. This is up to you.
8 Fix photo Faults
If there are flaws in some of your photos, such as bad lighting, poor contrast, washed out colours and so on, they can be fixed in Photos. Click a photo in a collection or album and then click the pencil icon at the top. Select Basic fixes on the left and Retouch on the right. This tool is used to erase unwanted items in photos. It won’t remove large objects, but it works with small ones, such as wrinkles on a face – a tear or scratch in an old photo, for example. Let the mouse hover over the area for a second and then click the mouse button. This is a bit hit and miss, but if it doesn’t fix the fault, press Ctrl+Z to undo the action and try it again.
Also in the Basic fixes section is a straighten tool for correcting a tilt in the photo caused by the phone or camera not being horizontal. Select the tool and then click and drag the white circle around the circle. A live preview shows the result, and the overlaid grid helps you line up vertical buildings, horizontal horizons and so on.
Red-eye, the effect caused by a camera flash reflecting off the back of someone’s eye can be fixed in Photos. Click a photo, click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, select ‘Basic fixes’ on the left and ‘Red eye’ on the right. Use the plus button in the bottom right corner to zoom in on the eyes, and click the tool on the red. This reduces it and makes the eyes more natural.
9 Apply Filters
Click a photo to open it and then the pencil icon to show the editing tools. Select Filters on the left, and on the right is a strip of thumbnail images. Each has a slightly different effect, and you can click them to apply them. There aren’t many effects compared to some photo editors, but they are easy to experiment with. Always use the Save As icon at the top to save the modified image as a new file and keep the original photo unchanged.
10 Selective Focus
This effect can be used to keep the subject of a photo pin sharp while blurring the background. This is particularly good for portraits where you’re focusing on the face and the background is irrelevant. Click a photo, click the pencil, click ‘Effects’ on the left and ‘Selective focus’ on the right. A circle appears with dots at the top, bottom, left and right. Click and drag the centre of the circle to move it over the area to focus on and drag the dots to size it and shape it.