They offer the same functionality such as slideshow, rotation, printing, and email.

There is not much difference between the two when previewing photos. Windows Live Photo Gallery 2012 includes quick Photo Viewer mode which happens to work just the same as the built-in Photo Viewer in Windows 7 and earlier versions. In this case, you only want Photo Gallery. When you run the installer, all of the programs in the suite will be checked by default, but you can uncheck the ones you don’t want.

So, the best way to replace Photo Viewer on a clean Windows 10 install is to install the Windows Live Photo Gallery from Windows Essentials 2012. When Microsoft launched Windows 7, many of the bundled apps, including Photo Gallery, were moved to the free Windows Essentials suite which is available as a separate download. Photo Viewer was initially based on Microsoft’s Photo Gallery, which originally came preinstalled with Windows Vista. Clean install of Windows 10 doesn’t include Windows Photo Viewer, only the Photos app by default.

Update windows 10 photo viewer