Windows Photos gets JXL support, improved context menus, OCR web search, and more

Microsoft is rolling out a big new update for the Windows Photos app in the Windows Insider program. Insiders in all Windows 11 and 10 preview channels can try new features like searching the web with OCR, improved context menus, subfolders support, a dedicated Copilot button, JXL support, and more.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the Photos app on Windows 10 and 11. With the latest update, you can select recognized text and click "Search in Web" to find more information about it.

Next, the app's context menu is being improved. When right-clicking an image in File Explorer, Windows 11 will present you with a new submenu that contains additional features like "Edit with Photos," "Erase Objects with Photos," "Create with Designer," and "Visual Search with Bing." This change will make it easier for users to discover additional features in the Photos app and launch them much quicker.

The Windows Photos app now lets you hide or show subfolders and their content in the Gallery for richer and more convenient navigation. Plus, the toolbar received a dedicated Copilot button for sharing images with AI to receive photo editing tips, image insights, and framing suggestions.

Finally, the app received two additional changes:

• Due to popular requests, the Photos app now supports JXL files.
• We implemented bug fixes for the Image Creator and Restyle Image features on Copilot+ PCs to improve overall quality and performance. This includes successfully loading Image Creator in the Photos app on the initial launch of Photos and being able to Save generated images under a different file name.

All these changes and improvements are rolling out to insiders with Windows Photos version 2025.11030.20006.0 and newer. Note that the rollout is gradual, so you might not have every update right after installing the latest release.

You can read more about the update here.

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