Photos in Windows 11 will get a slideshow mode and image retouching
Microsoft continues to improve the Photos system app in Windows 11 — for example, last year it got integration with iCloud, and now the company introduced the new Photos features in Windows 11 test builds, which are available in the Canary and Developer channels.
First up is the slideshow mode, which the app’s developer says has been the most popular request from the community since the revamped Photos launched last fall. Various animations, transition effects, accessible music playback, etc. work in the slideshow.
Another user-requested feature is the Timeline Scrollbar. Photos will bring back a “timeline” for all photo categories, sorting photos by when they were created, and grouping them by year and month — so the user can “scroll” through their photo collection to the desired date using a vertical scale.
And the last big feature that Microsoft is currently testing is Spot Fix, which allows you to retouch photos by removing spots or unwanted areas from them. Unfortunately, this is not an analogue of Magic Eraser from Google – Spot Fix does not allow you to select an object and make it “disappear”, but simply tries to retouch the selected area so that its content matches the rest of the photo.
In addition, the new version of Photos has also received minor updates – for example, support for drag-n-drop when importing from external devices, fixing problems with audio playback in video files, support for selecting multiple photos using the Shift and Ctrl keys, etc.
To access the new features, Windows Insiders must update Photos to version 2023.11050.2013.0 or higher. When they will appear in the stable version of Windows 11 is not yet known, but most likely in the coming months.