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

The Photo's app in 8.1 rt will only show photos on this PC.  I am using a Surface RT with 8.1 installed.  The new photos app will only show Pictures on this PC.  Even though I have SkyDrive with photos set to download to the Surface, those pictures will not show up in the photos app.  I have also added the directory to the Photo's library.  I can access the photos offline by going to the desktop and browsing the skydrive or photos library, but it just will not show up on the photos app.  Also what happened to facebook, flickr and other sites.

the weird thing for me is that as with the others, I cannot see any of my pics from facebook, skydrive etc, but I messed around with the libraries etc and was able to see photos I just took that were on skydrive appear on the live tile......but they were nowhere to be found when opening the photos app.....I have to believe this cant be on purpose and that the photo all will get the old functionality back........

Also the fact that you cant sort by date, makes me crazy.....I don't want to scroll thru every pic to get to my recent ones on the skydrive metro app......

100% agree with everyone's comments so far.

I was 100% convinced this was a bug as to do it on purpose just seemed crazy.

I was at an official Microsoft surface training session a couple of weeks ago and one thing I think everyone thought was clever was the ability to get a picture from anywhere to do anything such as set a password picture.  Now I have to find a picture on an app that does not exist yet, save it to my surface and then go back in to what I was doing, absolutely bonkers!

And its great the lock screen does slide show now but am I going to spend hours selecting pictures and saving the to my surface just to do that? Simple answer no.

So I really hope you are wrong Carmen or that MS continue the good work they have done with the xboxone and listen to your consumers.  Changing things to give your customers what they want is not weak or an horrific U turn it is CLEVER!

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.

Carmen, I'm sorry, but this is just perverse.

I hold all my media on a Windows Home Server, and expect to be able to access it from devices (including DLNA devices) on my home network.

I have too much data for SkyDrive, and besides, internet access is like a piece of wet string in my location.

I fully expect that Microsoft will drop Windows Essentials in favour of the Modern UI equivalents in the near future. The problem being that you have just demonstrated that you will not be providing equivalent functionality, but instead some dumbed down version that only works with storage in SkyDrive or on a local PC.

This is a massive jump backwards.

Sigh. Whatever your reasons were for including the Facebook and Flickr functionality in the first iteration of the Photos app, why take it out? The code is written, the work is done, and people clearly LIKE it. Why not just let people have stuff they like?

One of the things I like about Windows 8 is what seems like a shared design ethos with Windows Phone -- my life and my content take front and center, without being siloed into a bunch of different apps.  If you're going to remove the "hub" aspect of the Photos application, why not do the same to the People app?  After all, "soon there will even be a Facebook app from Facebook"! I'm sure that will let us "socially engage with our friends" as well as our photos (however one "socially engages" with a photography).

This strikes me as a simple and intentional regression, stepping away from something that represented a real innovation in UX.