Windows 10’s latest bug is particularly annoying – but there’s a fix incoming

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Windows 10’s Photos app has been crash-happy in recent times, at least according to various reports online, but the good news is a fix has been made available (even if Microsoft hasn’t officially announced it).

As Windows Latest reports, a recent update to the Photos app (possibly dating back to July) had the unfortunate side-effect of making the program crash just by opening an image (a seriously annoying bug, of course).

There have been widespread reports of these problems on Microsoft’s Feedback Hub, as well as its Answers.com forum, and also on Twitter (and there have apparently been suggestions that the problem may be related to the latest May 2020 Update, as well – but one report we’ve seen said that the problem occurred on the previous November 2019 Update).

The bug results in the Photos app simply freezing up as a black screen (or alternatively, a white screen), with nothing else happening. Reports suggest that it happens some of the time – not all the time – but certainly enough to make it highly annoying (the above report states that it plagues the user more than a dozen times per day).

The good news is that Microsoft has just pushed out a new version of the Photos app (v2020.20090.1002.0) to Windows testers which fixes the bug, at least according to Italian tech site Aggiornamenti Lumia, which highlighted this on Twitter.

No official acknowledgement

So the fix should be released soon enough, all being well – fingers crossed for that. As we mentioned at the outset, Microsoft hasn’t made any comment or even acknowledged this bug, but would appear to have simply implemented this fix behind-the-scenes.

This is just another in a long line of problems which have been cropping up since the May 2020 Update was released (and indeed before then). The latest bugbears we’ve reported on include broken internet connectivity under Windows 10, as well as problems with showstopping BSoD crashes (with Lenovo ThinkPads in particular).

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).