How to exclude folders with pics appearing in the photo gallery

This is symptomatic with so many Microsoft products over the past three or four years. They release products that on the surface look feature rich but once you start using them you realise they are missing fundamental and basic functionality. Whats worse is they often force you to "update" to their new versions which are stripped down versions of the originals but with a new lick of paint. Look at the office products, the decimation of OneNote, the new Outlook app completely removing client side rules, the new Teams app that keeps losing messages. Lets not even get started with their licence changes for things like PowerBI. They wont listen; they appear to have grown extra mouths and lost their ears.

Even these forums are a complete joke nowadays. You are better searching Reddit than the official copy and paste responses from the admins on here. More often than not the "solution" provided has no relevance to the issue. This thread is a prime example of that. Do the mods get karma per response or something? Anyway rant over... Have subscribed to this thread but wont be holding my breath for an actual solution.

This work around is not part of the discussion as I some have "SUBSCRIBED" or better yet, "PAY FOR" the Microsoft service... So, back to the question: Why can't we toggle the access on and off to a folder for privacy? The photo engine literally gives ZERO privacy, and subsequently is INVADING PRIVACY! THIS NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED NOW!

I wonder, could this lack of feature be considered a breach of privacy in a legal battle? Or do we just have to cancel the subscription to show the level of concern?

This is exactly what I was asking. Thank you!

Yeah, you are right, I didn't notice that part in the question.

In any case I totally agree with you.

Current behaviour is borderline unusable even with this filter.

I would say MS should create an option to select a set of folders to be shown is 'Photos' tab, and exclude all others.

At least that's what I would consider an acceptable solution.

Unfortunately, I don't think this post will ever be recognized by MS dev team.

Just as you mentioned MS never gives a **** about the desires of their customers. They live in their own universe.

The only advice I can give as of now is to purchase a yearly subscription to google cloud services. It is a bit more expensive but the UX is what you're paying for I suppose.

Hi Garmash,

If you read the key question, you see your answer is a reiteration of the issue and not a solution.

The filter is unreliable and oversimplified. Not up to current privacy standards we expect, that have been downgrading.

Anyone should be able to control visibility per photo and/or subfolder.

Microsoft continues to show quite a bit of arrogance when trying to guess what the users want.

This is annoying me to the point of being actively looking for alternatives to Onedrive Photos.