Microsoft finally made importing and organizing photos from our smartphones and digital cameras easy with the Windows 10 Photos app.
Until late 2020…
As it imported photos and videos from out devices, the Photos app would group and organize the files into folders by month and year to be saved in the perfect place – the computer’s Pictures folder. This was a great advance from searching through hundreds, if not thousands, of images imported into the single Pictures folder, or learning how to create folders and moving groups of photos from the Pictures folder file pile into manageable groups in separate folders.
The Photos app still offers the ability to import everything from a device, or just the new files since the last import, or just groups or select files, but the sorting into individual folders by month and year appears to have disappeared with an update to the Windows 10 operating system in late 2020.
I’m seeing plenty of feedback (read complaints) through the Microsoft Feedback Hub and questions posed on other tech forums. There were forum suggestions from resetting the Photos app to doing a coded uninstall/reinstall, but no solid word from Microsoft on how to repair, or if the Photos app will ever be fixed.
This is a shame because, as I already noted, Microsoft finally made it easy for the non-tech savvy user to import and organize hundreds – if not thousands – of image files in a PC computer.
Users are looking for easy. They are being drawn to Cloud storage that automatically backs up their images, but with fees that quickly add up annually, not to mention over decades. Social media advertising push “photo sticks” that automatically find and copy image files from computers and smartphones, but at a storage cost three to four times the cost of similar capacity flash drives.
Microsoft made it easy and appears to be walking away.