Photos App in 8.1 loses most of its best features e.g. Facebook/Flickr support...

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.

 

 

Just to throw it out there but Music and Video also appear to have issues with seeing network content that was all working fine before the preview was installed. Of course if you go through Windows Explorer everything works as expected...

its crazy to think that Microsoft would remove such a feature in an age where more and more people are storing picture, movies and music on separate hard drives. Nas drives must be supported!

           

It is a shame that Microsoft will not listen to their customers on this subject, especially with all the talk that they listen to feedback. I will not use the Photos app at all until they bring this integration back in.

I agree...and I won't be buying any Windows 8.1 device or upgrading any of my other computers either

This is the best video Carmen Zlateff ever made, this is what people want as a Photo apps !

All the feature we want are in that video !

http://youtu.be/R0qBZyjK2MU

I can't understand why they change it into 8.1

This is absolutely astounding.  Photos App, far from being perfect, was the first step in an awesome direction.  I believed in the direction MS was going with this paradigm....and, well, they just decided to forget it. 

I actually purchased a new computer with Windows 8, 200gb Skydrive, etc., just so I could network my computers, share my photos across devices, etc., as I'm a photographer and want all of my images (and original raw files) always at my fingertips.  Tough luck, right? ;)

Thanks for the feedback, everybody.  In Windows 8, we wanted to provide a way for folks to view their photos on other services knowing there would be few (if any) apps in the store at launch that would do so.  Now there are many apps in the store that offer ways to view photos on other services and soon there will even be a Facebook app from Facebook.  We’re confident Facebook will offer great ways to view and engage socially with photos on Facebook.  We welcome Flickr to do the same.  In addition, the People app still offers the ability to socially engage with your friends and even your own photos.

i strongly disagree.  In fact, there really was no need for a Flickr app anyway, at least not on the Surface tablet.  The screen is plenty big to navigate Flickr.  (Well, almost -- I do use a mouse or a stylus when the menu items are small on IE pages.)  So what would an app do that IE cannot?  just lay out the page so that functions are more easily accessed, right?  I can live without a Flickr app.  What I really miss is the integration that you yourself described in your YouTube video here...

http://youtu.be/R0qBZyjK2MU

Bring it back, please!

I've got $10 that says Facebook or Flickr or both put pressure on Microsoft to stop including their photos in the Photos app in exchange for them working on Windows 8 apps of their own.  Of course, there is no Flickr app yet.

I will say that, with the improvements to SkyDrive, I actually used the Photos app today to go through the photos from a recent trip and delete redundant ones.  I liked how I could open the Adobe Photoshop Essentials app to edit photos from the built-in Photos app.  For me, the elimination of the Facebook and Flickr connections is not a huge deal, but I can understand for others how it might be.