To get the Windows Photo Viewer back you will need to edit the Windows Registry and add some information to it. Fortunately its not that difficult to get back and you can use the program once again after performing a few steps on your end. Rather it has been 'hidden', so you aren’t able to use it without doing a little tweaking on your end. If you look for the Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10 or 11, you won’t find it anywhere but that doesn’t mean it’s not still there. Windows 10 & 11 now uses the Photos app by default to open image files and it should work just fine for most people but for others they prefer the original Windows Photo Viewer

Yes its nice to have new software to use as long as it’s an improvement over the old software it is replacing. Sometimes it seems as though Microsoft likes to change things that work just fine just for the sake of making changes. You might have noticed when you upgraded to Windows 10 or 11, assuming you were on an older version of Windows to begin with that many of built in programs you used for various things like watching movies and viewing photos were changed to the new Windows 10 'apps' and you might not like these new apps compared to the programs you were used to in Windows 7 let’s say.

Windows image viewer