Using the Photos App

The new Photos app is a great way to view your photos, whether they are on the PC, in SkyDrive, on your other PCs, or on various third‑party online photo sharing services. It also provides photo acquisition features, so you can acquire, or “download” photos from a digital camera, memory card, or other device.

The Photos app, shown in Figure 9‑2, is a typical, full‑screen, Metro‑style experience, with large tiles representing the photos on your PC, in various online services, and on your other connected PCs.

These sources can include some combination of the following:

• Pictures library: Here, you’ll find all of the photos stored in the Pictures library on your PC.

• SkyDrive: Microsoft’s cloud storage service, SkyDrive, provides 25 GB of free storage plus paid annual tiers for those who need even more.

• Facebook: The most popular social network on earth is also an increasingly common way for people to share photos with friends, family, co‑workers, and other contacts.

• Flickr: Yahoo!’s popular Flickr remains the number one photo‑sharing service on earth.

• Connected PCs: If you’ve downloaded and installed the SkyDrive desktop application from www.skydrive.com on each of your PCs, you will see the photo collections from those PCs listed here as well. In Figure 9‑2, for example, Ivy‑1 and Series9 represent other connected PCs.

Figure 9‑2: Photos app