If, on the other hand, they're not there at all, then you have no choice but to edit your registry (because somehow photo viewer has 'forgotten' that it can open these file types). You'd be surprised how many programs do this by default, forcing you to delve into the program options to free them up so you can change them back (I find Nero products are usually the worst). the images still open in another program), then the other program may be 'locking' the file associations and preventing them from being changed. If they're there, but ticking them doesn't work (i.e. I find 'Default Programs' more robust than 'open with', but you should try selecting 'choose defaults for this program' instead of 'set as default' - this will give you a list of all file extensions that photo viewer thinks it can handle (with checkboxes), and you can see if 'gif'/'png' are present. gif, png etc) - I assume that you know you have to click the little 'expand' icon to the right of the 'Other Programs' heading before you'll see them all, otherwise you just see the 'recommended programs' (which will not generally include photo viewer, even for compatible file types).Īnother option is what Microsoft said - use 'Default Programs' in the control panel. I have never found an installation of Windows that doesn't have 'photo viewer' as a default option for 'open with/'other programs' for all image types that it can handle (e.g.

there doesn't seem to be a single 'supported file types' list, like there is with stand-alone programs. It also appears to handle associations differently in the Windows registry, e.g.

You can't 'browse' for it from 'open with' interface. Windows photo viewer is part of the shell, so it behaves differently to a stand-alone program. Might be useful to you in identifying the problem - would test myself in Win 10, but can't be bothered given that the upgrade worked perfectly for me Interesting - worked perfectly for me as described (upgrading Win 8.1 Pro to 10 Pro), did you upgrade from a different OS?Īnyway, if your interested, here's a post of mine (under the handle Paul_9999) in an older Microsoft thread on the topic of Windows Photo Viewer (at least in Windows 7).

Mouse wheel zooms instead of scrolls