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

I have had a Surface RT for about r months now, and overall it has been a huge battery for my iPhone. That said in the past few weeks I have been using it more for blogging and it has become a nice tool over some of my other devices. I just recently added all of my services into the photos app and re-discovered photos that I have not seen in years. It was a joyful reunion to have such easy access and random images come right into my tiles. Pulling from Facebook, Flickr, and Skydiver all into one app was wonderful...

Then I updated to 8.1 and poof all that was gone. This was a horrible decision Microsoft. Especially when Flickr now offers 1TB of photo storage. A Flickr app does not cut it. For one small moment, the Surface RT was beginning to find a use and function... now it is simply a battery again. Sad. While updating and using the surface in the past couple of days, I have been envisioning the potential if you were 5 years earlier and offering value... now after the update, one core benefit was removed... sad that MS is still taking one step forward and 3 steps back...

While I like the new true split screen and am just getting into the update, I am actually wondering if I can roll back with my saved partition to get that photos functionality back again.

Please fix this...

Well well well.

This new Photos app is worse than I expected :

Skydrive support lost the "include the fetch my files from another computer" feature and this stupid thing is not able to show files stored on a Windows Home Server box.

You know what Microsoft ?

I won't store my 30GB+ photo library on skydrive, they will remain on my WHS, and I'll use another app.

Guess what ? Crop and resize gadgets are completely irrelevant when an app is sufficiently castrated  to be unable to access files.

More on that, I feel that the app was prettier before and now it is as ugly as Fast Photo Viewer (third party app) which can access WHS V1 files without a flaw and without fiddling with silliness.

I'll stick with that one.

Folks, give it a try : http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/photo-fast-viewer/7a42846c-edd4-44c3-9673-13945fab72a5

It's quite impressive to see that the Microsoft team responsible for the photos app fiasco can't match the basic browsing capabilities of a small third party app.

So many questions, LEAST of all, is Carmen and msft_katiekatie the same person?. Do these people have a set script ? and prepared answers to cut and paste? are we talking to robots!!!?

According the this blog post "Katie Frigon" is the "group program manager of the You-Centered Experience team".

Who knows...

It's clear they all have prepared scripts! I guess they thought it was ok to post a stock reply months ago, only to regurgitate virtually the same message (just yesterday!!!!).

It's clear now, this is their stance, they will eventually scrub all integration from Windows, when that's done, Phone will be next....

It's a nice app, they just killed it for everyone by removing the best part.

It would be nice to have them say "don't worry, it's coming back, were just working on it". But from the sounds of it, someone thought they had a great idea by removing it. How about removing them instead.

The length of this thread is the best "feedback" they can possibly get, does anyone know of whom we can ask on Twitter to really be heard?

It really feels like Flickr and/or Facebook are twisting MS arm to remove the integration as a bargaining chip so they will create an app for Windows OS. I was hoping with Win8.1 integration would get stream lined yes, but also get deepen with all the Social Network now in existence.  Honestly with MS it feels they take one step fwd and two steps back. It’s very frustrating. MS claims they listen to our users!!!! If they really do we will see an update to bring back this feature. Hopefully this is not all politic… I made a mistake of updating my laptop but my home machine will stay on Win8.0. I will no longer invest in Surface Pro 2. This is how much this feature meant to me.