Troubleshooting Windows 8

Clearing the Photo App Tile

Clearing the Photo App Tile

The Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 photo tile shows 5 random photo’s from your 50 most recent photo’s either on your hard drive or onedrive, but what if there happen to be photo’s in there which you rather not see anymore, or are just too embarrassing to have show up during a coöperate presentation? Then this tutorial is something you should read, we will walk through all the steps you need to take, to make sure the pictures are gone.

Photo’s removed from your system will still appear on the photo app tile, these steps will also solve that problem.

[alert-note]The Photo App randomly selects every 24 hours 5 new pictures, it does only do this however if you have the app running in the background.[/alert-note]

Step 1, Starting the Photo App

We’ll first have to check some settings in the photo app to make sure we can apply the changes we which to make to the Tile

  1. Start the Photo App
  2. Move your mouse to the top right corner, then select Settings
  3. Then select Options
  4. Set “Shuffle photos on the Photo Tile” to Off
  5. Close the Photo App and open your desktop.
    Make sure you CLOSE the app, do not switch to the desktop, move your mouse to the top right corner and click the Red Cross to close the app (Windows 8.1 Update 1)

 

Shuffle Photos Off
Shuffle Photos Off

 

Step 2, Turning off the Live Tile

After you’ve disabled the Shuffle Photo’s option you’ll have to check and see if the Live Tile is also disabled, its easy to do:

  1. Open Start
  2. Right-click the Photo Tile
  3. Click on Turn live tile off
2014-06-20_19-17-06
Turn live tile off

 

Step 3, Clearing the Live Tile Folder

Now that we have done all that, we can go ahead to removing the content from the Tile Folder, this folder has 5 images, the 5 images you see in the tile.

C:Users%USERNAME%AppDataLocalPackagesFileManager_cw5n1h2txyewyLocalState
  1. Go tothelocation shown above, the easiest way to do this, is to copy the text above and paste it intheadress bar of File Explorer:
    Copy and paste location in File Explorer
    Copy and paste location in File Explorer

     

  2. Then remove all files beginning with the name Tile and with the .jpg extension.
    2014-06-20_19-23-23
    Remove files with .jpg
  3. Then remove all files ending with the .bat extension
    .dat file
    .dat file

     

  4. You can now close file explorer.

 

[alert-warning]Received a permission denied error? Then make sure that the photo app is properly shut down, open task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and if the photo app is shown, right-click it and select End Task. Then try the steps again.[/alert-warning]

Step 4

Now that we’ve done all this you can re-enable the options you turned off in step 1 and 2

  • Open the Photo App, Go to Settings, and Turn on Shuffle Photos on the Photo Tile
  • Open Start, right-click the Photo tile, then select Turn on live tile.

 

I hope you were able to solve your problem this way.

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