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

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.

If you can point to one thing that everyone that reviews Windows Phone OS loves about the operating system, and what personally sold me on it, its the integration and aggregation that it does when dealing with people, photos, messaging etc.

That is the one UNIVERSAL thing that everyone likes about the OS. So to take a photos app for Win8 that embraced this ethos, and dial it back to a completely useless local file viewer seems beyond absurd. I can't even contemplate what motivated this.

If anything the built in windows phone apps needed to be MORE like Windows Phone, not less. Get your heads in the game. The stakes are too high to make errors like this.

I really hope that since we are using a preview of RT 8.1 that the goal would be to take feedback, bugs etc and execute on them prior to Final release...Lets hope...Right now the Photo app is dead to me....total waster of time and has changed how look at the connected story, as a major part isn't currently connected anymore.

For your last point, from the start screen, bring up the charms menu, click the settings charm, click tiles and turn 'show more tiles' on.

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.

Please note that whilst Microsoft has chosen to remove external services from the pictures app (which is a significant retrograde step), even Microsoft's own pictures library is now no longer supported correctly in the 8.1 photos app. My photos (from a SE 2012 network share) don't appear in the photos app. They do however, show on the live tile.

Libraries are supposed to be a logical way to aggregate your media, regardless of where is physically resides. I hope you can accept that the 8.1 photos app should respect the design of libraries in 8.1

That does not make Carmen right, not a single person on here has found a positive reason for this change.

Not a single person here had a direct input into the development of the 8.1 preview.

If senior members of the Microsoft team cannot appreciate why the current incarnation of the 8.1 photos app is a retrograde step, then that surely demonstrates a level of detachment which will cause the whole design of the stock photos app to fail miserably.

At best, a poorly considered response from Carmen. At worst, a demonstration that senior members of the team "just don't get it"

You are better than this, Microsoft. Show us the biggest software company in the world still understands how to make great software people love to use.