Is it only me or this new universal photo app is truly terrible!?

[Teo Bartulovic]

Hi,

I switched to build 10149 couple of days ago and what annoys me the most is the new photo app? It is so sluggish, ugly and hard to navigate, typically example how it looks like when the mobile apps UI design gone wrong! I understand idea behind the universal apps and intention to looks similar across various devices but in this case it simply doesn't works... The old photo app is incomparable better solution in every segment, the best interface is no interface, simply swipe right to access folders and favorites is replaced with this ugly and hard to reach hamburger!? WTF!? To make it even worse it doesn't display all albums only, camera roll, screenshots and saved photos and there is no favorites photos all.

The situation is even worse when you attempt to find certain photo and attach it/send it/or something else from app no matter is it native or 3rd party?! There is no way to switch to albums view and access backgrounds album for example, instead you are forced to browse through couple of hundred of photos sorted by date which is insane and incredibly annoying!! The only app capable to access albums/folder is the WhatsApp and Outlook if you chose to attach photo through file manage instead of photo app.

Just hope this is not the final concept and they'll make it more 'mobile friendly' or at least offer old photo app through store as an alternative to those who prefer swiping over hamburger and albums over collections...

last but not the least, sorry 4 my English, it is not even my 52nd but a third language so apologies once again, just hope that whole point isn't 'lost in translation'...

P.S. Here are the couple of screenshots:

Default collection view with lot of wasted space...


No pivot, only hard to reach hamburger..


Album view is currently totally useless and looks horrible..


Simple task as changing start background is painful experience as there is no way to access, for example wallpapers album/folder directly...

That's all folks for now

 

[andy-hcn]

i would say it's just pain in the a*$ -_-

 

[Teo Bartulovic]

i would say it's just pain in the a*$ -_-

That's what I'm talking about

 

[Teo Bartulovic]

Just updated universal photo app not working properly, it brings some more than welcome additions such as nice looking zooming like tile animation, manual refresh and the option to set lock screen and start background right from app but unfortunately it not working properly, as a matter of fact it works but only if you have pre-cropped photo, if photo needs to be cropped before it not offering cropping dialog but stretch and crop photo on its own and result in 99% situations isn't as it supposed to be.

Stretched background (Photo app)

Here is how it should looks like (Settings app)

I also noticed that swipe to get photo info not working anymore, and feature is now moved under '...' submenu. Photo indexing is a little bit faster with this version but there is still quite annoying delay before it index and display newly added or captured photos. Last but not the least there is still not proper support for albums.

All in all, it is nice to see they trying to improve it but I'm not quite impressed with latest update...

 

[Sameer Parihar]

It is a very nice looking app but I do not like the implementation of albums atm. I have my albums created on OneDrive in the album section but they simply do not show up here. I don't like how the PC needs you to locally group files, it won't take Albums from OneDrive. It's not exactly easy creating albums, it's actually complicated. The organization feature works well and so does the auto enhance but it needs to be more straightforward and easier to use. The app is not very universal in terms of albums but for all the photos in general, it's nice.

Another thing I hate is how the auto upload is turned off by default. I lost a fair amount of pictures because I hard reset without knowing it was off. To turn it on, you need to go to OneDrive on the phone, then settings, then Auto Upload. Not as straight forward as 8.1

 

[Teo Bartulovic]

Thumbs up for the Outlook team, looks quite better after latest update with lot of improvements and little bugs and issues fixing, notification finally works fine, the only problem that I noticed so far is that sometimes when you click on notification it doesn't open the mail you clicked on but Inbox instead but that's something that I can live with Oh yes, one more thing, every update reset signature to its default state which is a little bit annoying if you have more than one account

 

[vodda]

But I still cant pin accounts to start? I used to do this in 10149, but not anymore.

 

[Teo Bartulovic]

No problems at all with accounts pinning, currently I'm having 3 pinned accounts on my start and everything works just fine...

 

[Prasun Banerjee]

Microsoft has repeated the fiasco that was the Music app on Windows 8.1 ... taken a perfectly working thing ... tinkered too much and made it nearly unusable !!!

 

[Sameer Parihar]

Microsoft has repeated the fiasco that was the Music app on Windows 8.1 ... taken a perfectly working thing ... tinkered too much and made it nearly unusable !!!

For me, 10166 made it better as now it doesn't have problems signing me in which before meant I had to soft reset it every single time for it to work. Also, it would sometimes stop playing the music for no apparent reason and I would have to soft reset it. Now the problem is that the repeat button doesn't always work. It rarely works when the screen is locked.

 

[Sameer Parihar]

No problems at all with accounts pinning, currently I'm having 3 pinned accounts on my start and everything works just fine...

View attachment 108507

What app did you use to get that awesome photography header in that pic? It looks amazing!

 

[Teo Bartulovic]

What app did you use to get that awesome photography header in that pic? It looks amazing!

Ah that one, it is indeed, can't imagine my start screen without, although it is totally messed up now as I deleted most of my tiles and headers in attempt to prevent this ugly loading issue... and to make it even worse it didn't help, it still appears from time to time...

Anyway, it's free with in app purchase, in free version you are limited in number of headers, not sure exact number as I bought it long time ago... Oh yes, almost forget, the app is Group Tiles

Here are some sample from my 2nd phone which is running 8.1 at the moment...