Photos and images not opening on windows 11

Anonymous
2021-10-27T14:18:46+00:00

Ever since I have upgraded to windows 11 I have been having trouble opening image files (.jpg, .jpeg, .png) using the default "Photos" application.

I get the following message: "The specified procedure could not be found"

Weirdly enough, if I right click on the file and use "open with" and chose the default Photos app it works. And if open the file in paint, it opens without any problem. It is only when I double right-click on the file it gives me this error message.

Can anyone help me?

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Performance and system failures

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Anonymous
2021-12-06T21:31:21+00:00

I too had this problem. Don't know what happened but the link between the files and the program stopped working (was fine after upgrade to 11). I tried all of the suggested items below that I could make sense of but none worked for me.

I was at the last thing I could think of, uninstall the program and re-install it. Unfortunately it appears that Microsoft will not let you uninstall this app! It is grayed out!

But in trying to do this I found the fix.

  • Open Settings from the Window menu
  • Select Apps (5th one down) in the left hand menu
  • Select Apps & Features (first one) on right hand menu
  • Do a search or scroll down until you find "Microsoft Photos"
  • Click the 3 dot menu for this item and select Advanced Options
  • Scroll down until you see the option "Reset"
  • There are two options under this; buttons to "Repair" and to "Reset"

Clicking the "Repair" button did the trick for me and I can not double click a photo file and it will open in this app.

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-03-17T22:20:43+00:00

    I followed the answer that said to right click, select 'open with' and then select Photos and from there and it works' quicker than it sounds.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-03-20T00:43:51+00:00

    Clinton Collier,

    Thank you so much for posting this simple solution. I just recently upgraded to Windows 11 and was shocked when I couldn't open a photo afterwards (I use them every day). I read other fixes online that were so complicated I simply backed out of the page. When I found your suggestion tonight, I thought I would give it a try and am so glad I did. Much, much appreciated that you took the time to share your solution and with such clear steps.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-03-23T23:04:46+00:00

    "It's a Feature NOT a Bug" Win11 was jammed down my throat as my new Dell XPS15 came with the terd masquerading as an OS ... the people who know best how To Wreck a Nice Beach have jammed useless features like Cortana down our throats for years in an effort to have the paying users work for them identifying bugs while the OEM employees focus on CPU resource robbing snoop ware in every folder for clues on how to sell our behavioral data to those curating Spam. Dollars to a Donuts the Bug has all to do with Indexing & reporting back to MS ... if it were simply a problem with us viewing our files it would be an easy fix but the massive problem tells me there's a bunch of bad code revolving on snooping in the images the way Meta does on Instagram & Facebook.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-04-07T13:01:45+00:00

    Interesting, I had the same problem and resetting or repairing Photos didn't work

    so I did what you did and installed irfan. when irfan asked me to file associate, i did for jpgs and gifs.

    when i tried to open a jpg, surprise surprise, Microsoft didn't like that. It felt threatened and asked, desperately me if I wanted to associate it with its up to now, non functional Photos app.

    so i selected yes, and now lo and behold, the Photos apps works.

    just need some leverage on Microsoft to make their apps work i guess.

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