Buzz
Are you facing issues with the Windows Photos app being sluggish and taking up to 30 seconds to open small JPG files? Even with a large amount of RAM and few running apps, Photos continues to exhibit significant delays. Below, Mytour will highlight some methods to troubleshoot the Photos app, ensuring that your photos and videos play immediately upon opening.
Why is the Windows Photos app excessively slow?
The root cause of the problem lies in the configuration settings within the Photos app that you may have unsuccessfully disabled. As a result, the Photos app displays a black screen, followed by a white screen for approximately 15 to 35 seconds before it begins to show images or videos.
Typically, you only experience delays when opening the first photo in Photos; subsequent photos tend to load more smoothly. If you find it frustrating that images consistently display slowly, here are some ways to troubleshoot the issue.
Repair and Reset the Photos App
If you encounter sudden delays with the Photos app, you should immediately reset the app to its default configuration. Search for “Photos”, then right-click on it and select App settings. The repair process for the Photos app is swift and straightforward, preserving all the application data.
The repair process for the Photos app is swift and straightforward, preserving all the application data.
After this step, you will notice an immediate improvement in image loading times. If you haven't experienced a faster app yet, press Reset to clear app data, but you'll quickly regain the data through your Microsoft account.
Optimize App Settings
After repairing and resetting, you need to optimize the settings within the Photos app. First, ensure it's selected as the default photo-viewing app. Press Windows + I to open Settings. Navigate to Apps.
Open the Default apps tab, under Photo viewer, click Choose a default.
Select Photos as the default photo-viewing app. If you find it's already set up, you don't need to go through this step.
Next, open the Photos app from the search bar. Navigate to the ellipsis icon at the top right and click Settings.
Many configuration settings in the Photos app may have been enabled by default. To ensure quick responsiveness, you need to optimize these settings. The most crucial is synchronizing the Photos app with OneDrive, something you may not need frequently. Each time you open a photo, this feature impacts response speed. Therefore, turn off the “show my cloud-only content from OneDrive” option. If you don't use OneDrive, you can skip this step.
Additionally, you can disable “Display delete confirmation dialog”, a feature that consumes extra memory.
“Use hardware-accelerated video encoding when available” is something you can skip unless you intend to use the Photos app for video editing.
The Photos app can be resource-intensive when loading photo folders. Therefore, you should also “Disable indexing parts of your library stored on Network locations”.
Use Troubleshoot
After following the above two steps, you'll notice a significant improvement in the Photos app's responsiveness. If issues persist, open “Troubleshoot settings” from the search bar.
Scroll down the list and select Windows Store Apps.
Press Run the Troubleshoot; the troubleshooting process will commence, addressing any issues with the Photos app.
The troubleshooting guides here will help you resolve the issue of the Windows Photos app being slow. This app error is not common, and if you still can't fix it on your own, consider seeking help from a service center. Good luck!!!
