Relating to a question in my previous post

in which David Marten inquired about doing the same in MS Photos, I decided to look into the matter.

I was surprised at that I couldn’t locate any examples of this. The only ones that would work were if MS-Photos was already defined as the system’s default image editor, then you could use any approach to launch the file and it would obviously open in MS-Photos (nothing easier that FollowHyperlink).  Sadly, having MS-Photos as the default editor is not likely and messing with users’ registry wasn’t an avenue I wanted to use.

I went through 100s of threads and not 1 worked!

Launching MS-Photos

Simply opening MS-Photos is pretty easy. This you can find some threads on, quite often using PowerShell though, but there are examples that exist.

Below are ones that worked for me when I explored all of this:

Option 1

Shell "explorer.exe shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App"

Option 2

Shell "explorer.exe ms-photos:"

Option 3

CreateObject("WScript.Shell").Run("ms-photos:")

Opening an Image in MS-Photos

Now opening a file directly in MS Photos, I couldn’t find a single example anywhere. I don’t know if my GoogleFoo was lacking or, but I played around with PowerShell and VBA for hours and eventually found a syntax that worked!!!

Shell "explorer.exe ms-photos:FilePath=C:\Temp\MyTestImage.png"

Where did FilePath come from, PowerShell. I’ve used it for other cmdlets, so I randomly tried it, and it worked here! Simply luck in this instance.

Once we know the basic syntax, we can turn that into a simple function like:

'---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
' Procedure : MSP_OpenImage
' Author    : Daniel Pineault, CARDA Consultants Inc.
' Website   : http://www.cardaconsultants.com
' Purpose   : Open the specified image in the MS Photos app
' Copyright : The following is release as Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
'             (CC BY-SA 4.0) - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
' Req'd Refs: None required
' References:   (found after having developed this!)
'   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/launch-default-app
'
' Input Variables:
' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
' sImg      : Fully qualified path and filename of the image to open
'
' Usage Example(s):
' ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
' Call MSP_OpenImage("C:\Temp\TestImage.png")
'
' Call MSP_OpenImage("C:\Temp\Img_01.jpg")
'
' Revision History:
' Rev       Date(yyyy-mm-dd)        Description
' **************************************************************************************
' 1         2023-04-17              Initial Release
' 2         2023-04-17              Added viewer? to URI per referenced article
'---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sub MSP_OpenImage(sImg As String)
On Error GoTo Error_Handler

    Shell "explorer.exe ms-photos:viewer?FilePath=" & sImg
    
Error_Handler_Exit:
    On Error Resume Next
    Exit Sub
 
Error_Handler:
    MsgBox "The following error has occurred" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf & _
           "Error Source: MSP_OpenImage" & vbCrLf & _
           "Error Number: " & Err.Number & vbCrLf & _
           "Error Description: " & Err.Description & _
           Switch(Erl = 0, "", Erl <> 0, vbCrLf & "Line No: " & Erl) _
           , vbOKOnly + vbCritical, "An Error has Occurred!"
    Resume Error_Handler_Exit
End Sub

Note: Do not add quotes to the File Path (even if there are space in the path string) it will make the command/function bomb.

An Alternate approach could be to do

CreateObject("WScript.Shell").Run("""ms-photos:viewer?fileName=C:\Temp\MyTestImage.png""")

Using PowerShell

I’m not going to make an extensive posting about doing this using PowerShell but here is an example that you can always build upon should you wish to.

Launch MS Photos

Start-Process "shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App" 

Opening an Image in MS-Photos

Start-Process "shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App" -FilePath "C:\Temp\Img_01.jpg"

Or

explorer "ms-photos:viewer?fileName=C:\Temp\Img_01.jpg"

Minor Update – 2023-04-17

Murphy’s Law. After figuring things out through trial and error, and now knowing what to properly search for, I finally came across a useful MS article which covers the ms-photos: options. Hopefully it can help a few of you out there.

Launch the default app for a URI - UWP applications

Learn how to launch the default app for a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). URIs allow you to launch another app to perform a specific task. This topic also provides an overview of the many URI schemes built into Windows.