Windows Photo Gallery was one part of a suite of applications called Windows Essentials that Microsoft put out back in the Windows Vista days. It is a lightweight jpeg-only editor that is surprisingly powerful with a nice, uncluttered and simple interface. I rely on it heavily for touching up my photos before saving them to my hard drive after which they will in all likelihood never be seen again.

Last week I had to nuke and repave my computer following an ill-advised download that made it pretty much unusable. Don't ask!

I have backups, backups of my backups, and although not as up-to-date, off-premise backups of my backed up backups. No data was lost.

When I went to reinstall Windows Photo Gallery, I hit a snag that may well be unresolvable. I have the original download files of every piece of software I have ever used, including the activation keys and passwords, all ordered so that I can find and access any one of them in no more than 15 seconds. When I ran the Windows Photo Gallery installation routine, it got partly through and then stopped with an uninformative error message that with a little research told me that the program could not be installed because as of April 10 of this year Microsoft no longer supported it, and because of that would not allow it to be installed.

Is there any hack (perhaps registry edit?) that will allow me to install this program? I don't care that Microsoft doesn't support it. I never once needed support in the 15 or so years that I ran it, and wouldn't expect to need it in the future.

Can anyone help?

tanstaafl.

I've had this type of issue in the past.
I just disable my network and set the date into the past and most of the time the software installs just fine.

I don't remember the names but I also remember finding a few programs that let you setup a program to run with a fake date.

It's unlikely that the installation is keying off of the system date. More likely it's a particular Windows Update version at the OS level.

I'm sure you could google for the correct hoops to jump through which could potentially let you run the program. (Though the fact that you're asking the BBS means that you probably already did, and came up dry.)

In addition to faking the date, there may be ways that you can temporarily fake the windows version, or fake whatever component that's being keyed off of, allow you to use the old photo editor. There are tools from sysinternals which let you see what registry entries are being read by a given program, maybe you could use those to reverse-engineer which registry entry is being keyed off of, then temporarily change that entry to allow the installation.

Another possible solution might be to simply find and extract the file editor's executable and libraries, throw those in a folder, and see if they work. If it does, you'd need to tweak the registry yourself to associate your JPEG files with that editor.

None of the above will work, though, if it's the operating system itself which is detecting the program and then refusing to run it. Hm. I wonder... Windows has a compatibility flags feature which can allow it to perform specific tweaks to allow old programs to run. Maybe it's simply a question of putting the right flags into place. I don't know much about that feature of Windows but perhaps that could be another avenue of research.

But really (and I know this may be sacrilege to say it), you might want to consider ditching that editor and finding a new one that you like, one which has current support and updates. There are tons of free and inexpensive ones out there. I've successfully used FastStone and IRFan and others in the past. My image viewer/editor du jour changes over time depending on what's new/good and being actively supported.

IrfanView
https://www.irfanview.com/

Use it basically every day for basic copy, paste, crop, batch resize, annotate etc. Very reliable, fast. Recommended.

I have IrfanView, although not currently installed. I think I used it to open or crop a panoramic view photo (32 separate photos combined) that was just too big for any of my other graphics programs to open. If I recall correctly, IrfanView does not have the tools from Photo Gallery that I want:
Slider to reduce/increase highlights
Slider to reduce/increase shadows
Slider to reduce/increase brightness
Slider to reduce/increase contrast
Above all else, the histogram that let me... I don't even know how to describe it, perhaps tighten the dynamic range across the photo.

In 10 or 15 seconds I could take an uninteresting photo and make it pop. Three stops underexposed? No problem: Kill the highlights, bring up the shadows, bring down the brightness and use the histogram to trim out the dynamic range with no information in it. It wouldn't be as good as had it been properly exposed in the first place, but salvageable, viewable.

I have a copy of "Adobe Photoshop Elements 7" which I installed and tried a few years ago before deciding that I didn't want to go through that steep of a learning curve. I have the Paint.Net program that Tony steered me to, and for years that has been my go-to graphics program for simple, light editing: crop, clone, cut and paste, contrast, saturation. That program along with Photo Gallery did everything I ever wanted or needed.

I guess I'll have to install the "Photoshop Lite" program again and see if I can live with it.

tanstaafl.

IrfanView does have a histogram (Ctrl+H) and some colour correction (Ctrl+G) and a few other processing features although not exactly those like Colour Balance, Saturation and RGB+W correction. There may be a plugin that does some extra things you want too.

Anyway, I'm sure if you really wanted to get your favoured tool installed it would be possible. Any chance of putting a copy somewhere of the install you want to use and I'll have a go for you? Or show me where I can download it?

I tried to email it to you, but Gmail won't accept an attachment with an executable file, even renamed and zipped.

I don't have a dropbox setup or any way to post it as a downloadable. Sugggestions?

tanstaafl.

Might encrypting/password protecting the zip make it unrecognizable as an executable?
Otherwise there's the big-file transfer sites [TechReviewPro], some w/o registration.

What I have is not a big file, it is not even the program. It is an install file that goes to the internet and downloads the actual Windows Essentials suite. That may well be where the problem arises, the install program starts to run, but quits with error message after about a minute and a half -- probably because it goes to Microsoft to get the actual program files and Microsoft has removed them.

So even if I could send my install file to Shonky, it wouldn't do him much good. I'll see if I can't find the actual Windows Essentials files somewhere.

tanstaafl.

That sounds likely.

Right if you don't have a standalone installer that could be problematic. I have a place you can easily drop it but probably not worth the effort based on that.

Confirming you're trying to install this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Photo_Gallery

What about trying this?
https://digiex.net/threads/windows-live-...-version.14994/

Note there's some potential for malware and the like here. So make sure virus scanner is running although no reports there. Looks like there might be the odd problem installing but worth giving a go. Seems turn off your internet connection (unplug Ethernet or turn off Wifi) whilst installing.

I'm getting it now, but it's coming down fairly slowly (50 kByte/sec)

From the comments on that site (digiex.net) this looks like the real deal!

Windows Photo Gallery is now installed on my computer. It has been so long since I had to do any kind of setup for that program, I've forgotten how to tell it what directories to search for photos. But I'll figure it out.

Maybe. This is not as trivial as I imagined it might be. Still looking, but gotta run now.

Christian, this is the third (or is it the fourth?) time you have bailed me out of some insolvable problem. I owe you big time!

tanstaafl.

Got it! Well-hidden, but perseverance paid off.

tanstaafl.