When you want to view your pictures on your computer you will need an image viewer, Windows 10 comes with the “Photos” app by default, an app which supposed to let you view, edit, and manage your pictures easily, and it is integrated with OneDrive so that you can store and access to all your photos anytime and anywhere you are, but sadly, does not do what is expected to do, it is so slow and consumes a lot of processor and RAM resources and crashes often.
Windows 7 has a better image viewer (Windows Photo Viewer), a clean, light, and simple to use utility that it does what it is supposed to do: it lets users view their images. if you have upgraded your Windows 7 installation to Windows 10, this image viewer is still there alongside with Photos app, and you can use it as before, after making it the default photo viewer in the settings, but if you install windows 10 from scratch (clean install ), the photo viewer will be hiding, and you can no longer have access to it.
There is no executable file on Windows for Windows Photo Viewer. Instead, Windows Photo Viewer uses the DLL file named "PhotoViewer.dll" located in the "% ProgramFiles% \ Windows Photo Viewer \" directory to work, and it is enabled or disabled via a key in the Windows registry, which means that if you upgrade from Windows 7 The system keeps the registry key responsible for Windows Photo Viewer previously created in Windows 7, so you can continue to use it after the upgrade; But if you do a clean install of Windows 10, the system won't create this registry key during installation, so there is no Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10.
Fortunately, you can easily restore the Windows Photo utility using a ready-to-use registry file that you can merge it in the registry simply by double click on the file and select "Run", then "yes" in the box that's appeared in the screen, then go to the system settings --> Apps --> Default apps -->Photo viewer, and choose " Windows Photo Viewer" to be the default app, or you can watch this video to see how to do that:
Note 1: The two reg files I used in this video are created by the tenforums website.
Note 2: Click here to download those files.