Windows 11’s Photos app got a pair of smart new features recently, but now one of them has been put on ice – following the first (AI-powered) capability going awry in the past.
The features – which arrived in preview for Windows Insiders towards the end of October – are Super Resolution (that’s the AI effort) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
It’s the latter one which has just been ditched from Photos, as we were informed by Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc on X (hat tip to Neowin).
LeBlanc, who is Senior Program Manager on the Windows Insider team, explained that the OCR feature had to be disabled to fix some issues with it. As you might imagine, the functionality allows you to copy any text in an image within Photos to the clipboard, quickly and easily.
Microsoft updated its blog post introducing these features to let us know that OCR will be returning to Photos in a future update.
As for Super Resolution – which is an NPU-accelerated feature for Copilot+ PCs that enlarges and/or enhances images, improving low quality, or blown-up, pics – that ran into trouble when it was deployed to PCs that shouldn’t have it. Which we presumed at the time meant standard Windows 11 (non-Copilot+) machines.
While hardly disastrous, this is an unfortunate run for the Photos app. Still, hopefully OCR won’t be held up for long, although time is running out before Microsoft takes a holiday break (there’ll be no preview update in December, remember). So, we might be waiting until early next year before OCR is back in the Photos app.
