Add source to Photos app

Question

Is it possible to add additional accounts to the Photos app? Or am I going to have to write my own app?

Answer 1

The app is not extensible, so you are going to have to write your own app if you want the same functionality to access something that it does not access.  What precisely are you trying to do?  Why can't you simply use a Share contract?

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 2

The photos app is great for viewing pictures, sharing with others, or using within system pickers.  Having flickr is great, but what about smugmug, 500px, or zenfolio?  Share source and target is great, but not for albums of pictures you want sync'd.

Is this something that can extended eventually?  It seems very limiting now.

Answer 3

Its very unfortunate that all the MSFT apps behave like "islands" and are not extensible nor do they provide documentation of their protocol API.

So the only way to accomplish what you want to do is to write your own photo app and make it extensible. It will be quickly adopted by users if they can use it with their favourite pic cloud service.

You could use a GreaseMonkey approach to let others provide "plugins" or "extensions" that are verified by you as the app developer for malicious code and then digitally signed. Your app would download those script files into its local app folder on demand and load the code during runtime via <script> tags dynamically, given the digital signature matches the one you have bundled with your app. Of course this code would not be bytecode optimized by the JS Engine.

That's basically what the Bing SDK does. The code you embed into your app is merely a stub that downloads "modules" on your apps behalf and executes them.