Fix: No Icons for Pictures or Photos after Creators Update

Microsoft published a new version of Windows 10, named Creators Update. After it’s installed, your machine will be running Windows 10, version 1703. If you want to see which version of Windows 10 is on your machine, click Start menu, then click Settings, after you see Settings window, you need to click System and then choose About. Windows update exists to keep Windows operating systems updated with new security patches, regular updates and service packs. Unfortunately, sometimes one or more patches can cause a problem, for example Windows can’t boot, audio card is not working, and one of issues is changing default icons for some files, in this article with photos icon. After Creators update, Windows 10 is not showing default icon for photos, it only shows white icon which not represents default icon for photos. When you double click to photos, Windows will open photo file without problems, using Photos App.

There are four steps you need to to to solve this issue:

Before you start to troubleshoot this problem, make sure the image files (.jpg, .jpeg, .gif and others) are associated wih Photos app. To check that, you need to do right click to image file, then choose Properties, and then click Change (in the Open with section), and choose Photos app.

You need to run regedit with administrative privilege. Click to Start menu and type regedit.exe, then right click to regedit.exe and choose Run as administrator, and then click Yes. First step before we do any changes to registry editor is to do a backup of registry. In the registry editor you need to click File, and then choose Export. On the left side of window, you need to choose where you would like to save registry backup, and then define name of backup file, in section File name. Click Save, and you backup file will be saved to selected location.

After that you need to navigate to following: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.jpg, where .jpg is the extension of the icon you are having problems with (default icon for photos are missing).

Open the .jpg tree and choose UserChoice, right click to UserChoice and choose Permissions, choose ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES, in section Group or user names, and then click on Advanced.

In the new windows you need to verify permission entries. You local account (Computer name\User) should have Access, configured to Set Value, Inherited from None and Applies to This key only. Next, your Administrators(Computer name\Administrators), should have Access, configured to Full Control, Inherited from CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer, and Applies to This key and subkeys. After that you need to select “Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission enteries from this object”, at the bottom of the window. After that click Apply, and OK.

Move to location where your photos are, and then double click to photo file. You should receive a message that says “An app default was reset”, image file will be automatically associated with Photos app and the icon should be back to its normal, default icon for image files.