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Quofiend
Quofiend
Known Participant
April 8, 2026
Question

Oeening Photo viewer from Bridge and W11

  • April 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 29 views

I want to be able to click on an images thumbnail in Bridge, and have the image open for viewing in Windows Photo Viewer in W11.    All online searches point me to amending the file association. 
BUT, there is no Photo.exe to link to since the W11 Photo viewer appears to be a DLL OR is there another way to trigger this ? 
How do I associate JPG’s or any/all Bridge thumbnails to open in Windows Photo viewer instead of Elements. 
Native "Windows Explorer" opens JPG's into W11 Photo Viewer.  But when the Bridge association is set to "Explorer settings" they still open into Elements. 
Selecting the DLL appears to list Photoviewer but then when I click it says there are no associations with JPGs. 

 Around in circles. 

 

    2 replies

    Jeff Arola
    Community Expert
    Jeff ArolaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 10, 2026

    If you have a fully functional Windows Photo Viewer otherwise, then a .bat file as described below should work.

    Create the .bat file by using Notepad and pasting the following

    @ECHO OFF
    START rundll32 "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Photo Viewer\PhotoViewer.dll", ImageView_Fullscreen %~f1

    then save the file as

    OpenWithPhotoViewer.bat

     

    In Adobe Bridge under Edit>Preferences?>File Type Associations select that OpenWithPhotoViewer.bat

    as the choice for whatever file types you want like JPEG in my example.

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Erik Bloodaxe
    Erik Bloodaxe
    Legend
    April 8, 2026

    A possible solution:

    First make sure your Windows default settings are set to open JPEGs and any other image types you want in Photo Viewer. Then in Adobe Bridge, set the file association for those file types to the appropriate dll file. Bridge will then generate an error saying that there is no executable file. Ignore that and you should see that Bridge has set the file associations to “Explorer Settings”. Then hopefully you will be good to go.

    I did this a long time ago in Windows 10 days and it was successful but have not done so since so I can’t guarantee that it will work but it’s worth a shot. 

    Quofiend
    QuofiendAuthor
    Known Participant
    April 8, 2026

    Thx. But I’m afraid, this doesn’t work.  
    I’ll continue with the default space bar for viewing.  A mouse click would be easier but it’s looking unlikely. 
     

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