How to Enable Photo Viewer in Windows Server 2016+

By default, Photo Viewer isn’t installed or active. The first thing we need to do is check whether or not the DLL’s exist on the server.

Step 1: Check if Photo Viewer DLL’s Exist

Browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Photo Viewer on the server. If you see .dll files there, that means the files exist but aren’t registered. It should look like this:

If you don’t see those files, simply browse to the path above from a Windows 10 PC & copy the folder contents to the same path on your server.

Step 2: Register the DLL’s

Now that we know the necessary files are present, we need to register them.

Open Command Prompt (type CMD into Start) and right-click to Run as Administrator. Then copy and paste the following code:

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Photo Viewer\PhotoViewer.dll”

Step 3: Download PhotoViewer Registry Keys

Now that the .dll’s are registered, we need to import the registry keys. This allows us to “Open With…” from File Explorer and choose Windows Photo Viewer, as well as set default file associations for various file types, such as .jpg, .jpe, or .jpeg.

Download registry files from here: MS Photoviewer Registry Files.zip

Once downloaded, right-click the .zip file and extract it to a temporary location.

Step 4: Import Registry Keys

From Start, open Regedit.

File > Import > browse to the location you extracted the 4 registry files. You will need to import all 4 of them.

You should now be able to right-click an image file and Open With Windows Photo Viewer!

Step 5: Set Photo Viewer as Default App

If you’d like to make Photo Viewer your default photo viewing application, search Windows for “Default Apps” and then change Photos to Windows Photo Viewer.

Step 6: Allow Images in Thumbnails

This step is optional, but if you’d like to see a preview of the images from File Explorer (instead of just icons), you can do that by changing the File Explorer options.

Search Windows for Folder Options. Change to the View tab and uncheck “Always show icons, never thumbnails”.

That will change it from looking like this:

to looking like this:

That’s all there is to it! Hopefully this guide helped you out.

If your WordPress site is set up to use HTTPS and a reverse proxy, such as an NGINX reverse proxy, is put in front of it you may wind up with an infinite redirect loop.

Following the redirect in dev tools, it looks like this is happening:
https://example.com -> https://example.com

A head scratcher for sure, but understanding what is going on behind the scenes reveals the issue and the solution together.

Here is what is actually happening:

• Request is made to https://example.com
• The reverse proxy catches the request and makes it’s own request to http://example.com. Take special note that the schema changed to http.
• The WordPress site sees a request for http://example.com and says, “Hey, that’s not right, I am at https://example.com” and tells the browser to go there
• Repeat indefinitely

You could change the site to support http to the exclusion of https, however that is hacky and anything wanting https will still work itself into an infinite redirect.

An easier solution is to trick WordPress into thinking the request is https enabled.

WordPress looks at a server variable when determining the status of https. Open your wp-config.php file and add the following just after the <?php tag:

if ( $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'] == 'https' ) {
    $_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
    $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] = 443;
}

And now your site will work as originally anticipated.

Dastardly isn’t it 😉