05 January 2019

Windows 10 "invalid value for registry" opening image file

Googling for this message gets you lots of closed threads in Microsoft's forums with solutions that didn't work for me, usually involving registry edits or powershell commands.

So, I'm posting something here in the hope that someone else will be helped when they search for it.

At some point, some Windows update in the past year (posting in January 2019) removed or broke the "photos" app. I don't use it explicitly, so I never noticed that it was gone.

Reinstalling it from the Windows app store fixed the problem completely.