Enable Windows Photo Viewer in Server 2016

Enable Windows Photo Viewer in Server 2016

Enable Windows Photo Viewer in Server 2016


Windows Server 2016 has a lot of things disabled out of the box as to improve responsiveness and reliability. One of those things is Windows Photo Viewer. In this quick tutorial, I'll show you how to enable it. Now as you read through this, you might be wondering if there is a way to enable the Photo Viewer with Windows add / remove features or some built-in utility like that, but as much as I searched, I could not find a way to do it from within Windows Server 2016. So this method uses a donor OS. And please, if anyone has a different way of doing this, kindly share your knowledge in a comment below.

1. Copy the Windows Photo Viewer from another PC

First copy the Windows Photo Viewer from a Windows 10 PC. I heard that it won't work if you copy it from a different OS, but I haven't tried it myself. So just to be safe, hop on a Windows 10 PC and copy both of these folders:

C:\Program Files\Windows Photo Viewer\
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Photo Viewer\

After that, place them in the exact same directories on the Server 2016 PC. I've also had it happen that I found these folders already in a fresh install of Server 2016. So if you find these folders already there, just proceed to the next step.

2. Download the Registry Entries

Download and open the .reg files below. This will add the needed registry entries to your system's registry.

3. Enable thumbnail view

One last thing that you may want to do is enable thumbnails. All that is required to do that is, open Windows Explorer, go to File > Options > View and uncheck "Always show icons, never thumbnails" then hit OK.