Windows 8.1 Photo App

I’ve been looking a bit more at the Photo App that is currently available as part of the Windows 8.1 Preview. As I mentioned in my last post, Barb Bowman has already mentioned two major strikes against it:

The Photos App has changed:

1. No longer includes the ability to show images from Facebook, Flickr, SkyDrive

2. No longer allows images from other computers or the network –  am guessing that because there is now support for SkyDrive on RT and MS is heavily emphasizing that as the preferred storage location (when you upgrade, one of the questions asked before you even get to the desktop is if you want to use SkyDrive as your default storage area – and that seems to be the default – and MS feels the network, NAS, Homegroup, and other computers are deprecated.

I’ll add another couple.

• The editing functions will likely corrupt any Makernotes in the Exif that your camera may put there.
• If the Exif section in your original image was created by your camera in Little-endian file order, then when the Photo App saves an edited image, it will reverse this to be a Big-endian file order.

The Exif corruption is a long-standing issue. It’s been present for years in the Windows Photo Gallery application of Microsoft. They have acknowledged it as a bug, but they still haven’t bothered to do anything about it.

The Little-endian to Big-endian switch is also a carry-over from the behaviour of Windows Photo Gallery. It’s also highly ironic. The guidance from the Metadata Working Group states that applications that change the contents of an image file should preserve the existing byte order. It’s ironic because Microsoft is one of the founder members of the Metadata Working Group. They can’t even be bothered to follow their own guidance.

The Photo App as it stands is worse than useless.