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Q: I used Windows Photo Shop (or whatever it was called) in Windows Vista Home extensively to sort, edit and send photos to my HP printer. I cannot locate a photo processing locale anywhere in Windows 10. Is there one, or is this another app one must buy from Bill’s app store?

Also, Snipping Tool.  A nice device, but I gave up trying to use it on Windows 10. I keep getting the error “There is no email program associated to perform the required action. Please install an email program or, if one is already installed, create an association in the default programs control panel.” I have tried proffered solutions, settings seem okay, but the error message keeps appearing. (Thanks, Bill)

– Marvin R.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A:  You didn’t exactly say where you’ve been looking, but there is an app called “Photos” available right there on Win 10’s Start menu.  You can find it either by browsing the alphabetized list of items, or by entering “Photos” in the search box.

The Win 10 Photos app is certainly not the be-all end-all of image handling applications, but it is a far-sight better than Microsoft’s offerings in prior versions of Windows.  It includes the ability to import and organize, as well as correct and enhance pictures.  Because it’s from Microsoft, it also includes support for One Drive, so you can store your cherished pictures safely in the cloud, and share them with other PCs, or with other users.

One of the nice features of the Photos app is its ability to import pictures and auto-create albums to help keep them organized.  Depending on your preferences, this may be better or worse than the “Import pictures and videos” feature that was introduced in Win 7.  That facility forced users to do a lot of extra work in the form of applying keywords and choosing save locations.  If you were importing a lot of images (say, emptying a smartphone of accumulated digital pictures) you could wind up with dozens of directories and sub-directories with images scattered across them all.  It was also quite easy to make a simple mistake, and wind up with a labyrinthine directory hierarchy of subdirectories, sub-subdirectories, and sub-sub-sub- etcetera directories.  So, go and look again, because a Win 10 photo tool is hiding right there in plain sight.

As for the Snipping Tool, it’s pretty much exactly the same as it was in previous versions of Windows.  For those not-in-the-know, Snipping Tool is a handy little app that allows you to capture images of all or a portion of your screen.  This is especially handy when you’re sending questions to that Geek Guy with the Q&A column, and you want to show him what the problem looks like.

I’m not sure what proffered solutions you have unsuccessfully tried to follow, Marvin, but solving this problem should be as simple as following the directions that appear in the dialog box that you very accurately quoted in your question. However, before you can do that, you must first have an e-mail client installed and correctly configured with the details of a working e-mail account.  This is no different in Win 10 than it was in prior versions.  The association Windows is asking for is what tells it the name of the program to run when you attempt to send a snipped image via e-mail.  It may not make sense that Windows doesn’t already know this, but if it did, it wouldn’t be asking you for it.

To make this association, go to the Control Panel, and find the entry that says “Default Programs”.  If it’s not visible in the list, you can either use the “Search Control Panel” box to find it, or change the “View by:” drop-down to one of the icon views instead of the Category view.  Once you’re inside Default Programs, click on “Set your default programs”.  In the “Programs” list, locate your e-mail client.  Be careful that you choose the correct one, as you may have several e-mail clients on your computer.  You don’t want to just click the first thing you see that has the word e-mail in it, in case multiple apps have similar names.  Click “Set this program as default” and you should be able to snip and e-mail with wild abandon.  If, in the unlikely event these steps don’t work for you, remember you can always save your snipped images to disk and attach them as files to any e-mail you like.  This includes e-mail accessed via webmail, which doesn’t normally work with Snipping Tool.