Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

[BigDogsWang]

How do I stop Internet Explorer automatically downloading images from the web into Windows Picture and Fax Viewer? If I open a photograph someone has sent me it opens in this program, but I also find hundreds of other pictures from different websites stored in this program as well.

[rojash]

Windows doesn't download anything into the Picture and Fax Viewer, nor does the Picture and Fax Viewer store anything. If you open a picture from within an e-mail, first the picture must be decoded to make it viewable.
Windows has to store the decoded picture somewhere, so it stores it in your temporary files location. The picture and Fax Viewer is the default application for viewing pictures, so that's what's used to display the picture.
Once you open the viewer, clicking the forward and back buttons simply displays any other pictures that happen to be in the same folder as the picture that you chose to view.

If you don't want to see these other files, you can either empty your temporary files folder, or save the picture to a specific location

[BigDogsWang]

It seems for example, that if I visit the BBC website, I find all the pictures from the site including banners etc in the Pic and Fax viewer. It must surely take up quite a bit of memory? Can I actually alter this program so that it only views pictures i am opening and stores internet page pictures elsewhere?

[rojash]

Read my post again. This program doesn't store anything, it just shows you what's in your temporary files folder. If you are viewing a website, then in order to view the pictures they will have been downloaded to a location on your hard drive. That's how things work. If you then look at a picture in that folder, you will be able to see all the other pictures that are temporarily stored there.

I'm not sure why this bothers you. If you don't want to see the other pictures, either don't click the Next and Previous buttons, or download the picture that you want to view by right-clicking and choosing "Save picture as". You can then select a specific folder into which to save the picture.

This will not affect the storage used.

[scaniavabis]

Try this BigDogsWang (whatever that might be, don't like to ask really)

When looking at your piccy in the Picture and Fax Viewer click on File and make a copy. Send this copy wherever you like, say desktop or it will probably default to my pictures anyway, that's fine. Go the file you've saved and for Vista you right click it, select open with and choose your default program to view your pictures. They will all open with that program from then on.


Before the boffins descend on me with mighty swords, I know there are other ways but this is easy to follow for Vista users anyway

[scaniavabis]

You menton in your question that when you open a picture that someone has sent you..this implies you're talking email and if that's the case, the above will only work once you've saved it somewhere first. rojash is quite right in his explanation but he's in Greece so he doesn't fully understand what we patriots are trying to ask all the time. you'll have to excuse him a little

[BigDogsWang]

Thanks everyone

[rojash]

scaniavabis, ?