Windows Photo Viewer

Windows Photo Viewer is an image viewer developed by Microsoft that is included with Windows 7 and Windows 8. It was also included with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 under the name of Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. It was temporarily replaced with Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista, but has been reinstated in Windows 7. This program succeeds Imaging for Windows.

Windows Photo Viewer can show pictures, display all pictures in a folder as a slide show, reorient them in 90° increments, print them either directly or via an online print service, send them in e-mail or burn them to a disc. Windows Photo Viewer supports images in BMP, JPEG, JPEG XR (formerly HD Photo), PNG, ICO, GIF and TIFF file formats.

When compared to its previous version (Windows Fax and Picture Viewer), there have been several changes. The first and most noticeable change is seen in their user graphical user interfaces. The second change is their file format support: Although Animated GIF files were supported in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, they are no longer supported in Windows Photo Viewer. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft withdrew the support for this format from this application and left the job of displaying them to Internet Explorer. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer was also capable of viewing multi-page TIFF files, (except those that employed JPEG compression) as well as annotating the TIFF files. Windows Photo Viewer, on the other hand, has added support for JPEG XR file format and ICC profiles.

Although Windows Photo Gallery is not included in Windows 7, it did affect Windows Photo Viewer: Whereas Windows Picture and Fax Viewer used GDI+, Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Photo Gallery both use Windows Imaging Component (WIC) and both take advantage of Windows Display Driver Model.

Issues
The user interface includes buttons to rotate counterclockwise and clockwise (keyboard shortcuts Ctrl and Ctrl respectively). Clicking these buttons overwrites the image file (changing its date) without warning and without an option to "undo" the action. If performed on a device-dependent image file (e.g., an image file on the SD card from a digital camera), the new file will not necessarily be readable by the device (e.g., through the lack of an embedded thumbnail).

The Windows Photo Viewer does not honor the EXIF orientation info in an image file while displaying (soft rotate).

On some systems, scroll bars are not visible at all or, if a zoom operation is performed (e.g., using a mouse wheel), no subsequent scroll down or up is possible (instead, the picture can be dragged).