New, Redesigned Windows 11 Photos App Is Here With Smarter Gallery, Faster Editing, AI Object Removal, iCloud Integration & More

If you use the Photos app on Windows 11, Microsoft has a major upgrade coming your way. The company has unveiled a redesigned Photos app with a revamped Gallery, a rebuilt Editor, and a faster Viewer. The update starts rolling out to Windows Insiders today, with wider availability planned for later this year.

Windows 11 Photos gets a new Gallery and smarter search

The biggest change is the new Gallery, which brings photos from your PC, OneDrive, and Apple iCloud together in one place. You can browse pictures by date, find people, organize albums, and mark your favorite shots. Natural-language search also lets you describe a photo instead of remembering its filename.

Microsoft is adding Moments for photos stored in OneDrive, too. The feature groups related pictures into memories and automatically creates seasonal recaps. You can watch these collections as slideshows, share them, or save them as videos.

The new Gallery also supports offline browsing for photos available on your device. Meanwhile, iCloud for Windows users can bring their Apple photos and videos into the same collection.

The Editor gets faster, with more AI tools

Microsoft has rebuilt the native Editor using WinUI 3, claiming it launches 25% faster than the previous version. Its tools now sit under four categories: Crop, Enhance, Repair, and Stylize.

The Editor can remove unwanted objects using an improved AI model. It also introduces Relight controls, letting users position up to three light sources and adjust their colors and intensity. Presets such as golden hour offer quicker ways to change a photo’s lighting.

HDR editing also gets attention, alongside support for editing and saving HEIC and WebP images in their original formats. New social media crop templates should make preparing pictures for sharing easier.

The new Viewer opens photos faster

The redesigned Viewer promises 15% faster startup on average, with improvements reaching 30% for HEIC images. It also adds smoother keyboard navigation, improved HDR viewing, and expanded file support, including SVG.

Users can access image details, camera information, location maps when available, color histograms, and visual search. Opening an image from File Explorer will launch it in the new Viewer.

Microsoft is rolling out the redesigned Photos app to Windows Insiders first. The company expects to expand availability to all Windows 11 users later this year.

Microsoft isn’t slowing down with Windows 11 improvements, bringing better accessibility features and performance upgrades that could make the OS up to 20% faster. Users can also look forward to changing settings directly from Windows Search and improved phone integration.