Using photos from network drive with Windows 8 photo app

Question

I have photos on my network drive that I want to display (in live tiles preferably in the photo app).

Under c:\users\paul\pictures I have made a link to them, using mklink /d:

And this works fine in classic:

But nothing appears in the photo.app:

I am guessing that this is an issue with indexing - the photos won't appear until they are indexed, and Windows won't normally index a network drive (unless you make it "available offline, which just copies the files locally) - but this is exactly what the mklink was supposed to work around, and the properties show it is indexable:

Any ideas?

Solution

On the Building Windows 8 blog it has been reported that Photos will receive an update for this:

Photos

• Crop and rotate photos
• New auto-curated collage slideshows
• View photos and videos on network locations in your Pictures Library such as Windows Home Server, network shares, and HomeGroups
• Move through photos in your Pictures Library even when you open them from the desktop

— Source: Building Windows 8 - Updating our built-in apps for Windows 8

Comments

[Tamara Wijsman]

A Photos app team member has reported this as not present.

[Paul]

Cool, so there will be another source we can add in photos app that will include network drives. I am still curious why the mklink approach doesn't work as a workaround though.

[Tamara Wijsman]

@Paul: WinRT is a re-implementation, they probably didn't implement symlink support yet.

[Paul]

This isn't WinRT Tom, it is standard Windows 8.

[Tamara Wijsman]

Windows 8 uses WinRT for the Metro-style applications, feel free to read up although the first sentence there already suffices: Windows Runtime, or WinRT, is a cross-platform application architecture on the Windows 8 operating system. and clarified later: Applications developed using WinRT for Windows 8 were described by Microsoft as being Metro-style apps.

[glenviewjeff]

So this appears not to have been fixed as of 8/6/13. This is pathetic!