Hi all.

Before I start, I have searched and found a few people asking very similar questions; but sadly these questions were never satisfactorily answered. I appreciate that Microsoft Support Staff probably have a very busy job, and their answers to similar questions just looked like they'd skimmed the question, identified a couple of keywords and then copied and pasted the closest matching stock response, which was unfortunately the response to a very different question. If any of the community however have experienced this and know exactly, if anything, what I can do about it then I would much appreciate it.

So basically, my problem is, I only want to use the photos app to see the contents of my camera roll. I normally wouldn't use it at all but I do take a lot of photos with my Windows Phone and I quite like the fact that this will sync with One-drive and then appear in the photos app in my PC and that I can create albums which are visible on both. It's a nice way for me to organise those photos which are memories of days out with friends and the like.

What I don't want to see in there is the contents of the 'My Pictures' folder on my PC. That is just full of rubbish such as memes I've created, silly gifs I've downloaded to send to friends, screenshots illustrating computer issues I've asked for help with and paper documents I've scanned in to email to people.

I have gone into the settings on the app and removed the Pictures folder from the app and that has worked fine, I have only the camera roll in there just as intended, however in time the app takes it upon itself to re-add the Pictures folder.  The funny thing is, it doesn't do it right away, or when the app is restarted, but at some later date. At a guess, maybe it does it when the PC is restarted.

I do get what's going on here. Like most modern computer software, it's been written for use by someone who is totally technically illiterate, and wants their computer to just do things without the requirement of specifying what they want it to do. Somewhere in the app is presumably a piece of code that checks to see if the Pictures folder is included in the library, and if not then it will add it, because if I've removed it then I must have done it by accident and don't know how to get it back, and am now probably about to complain to Microsoft that 'all my photos have disappeared'.

The other thing I would like to change about the Photos app, is I would like to stop it automatically created albums, every time I start up my computer it proudly announces that it has looked through my photos and taken a wild stab at how I might like to view them, and it is then my job to open the app, one by one delete all the albums it has created, going back over a year so that I just have the albums I've created for things like holidays and stuff. Though this is a fruitless exercise because as with the Photos folder, the app will soon enough realise I've deleted its albums, presume I obviously did it by accident and am currently panicking that all my photos have been deleted forever, and heroically reinstate them the next time I open up.

Does anybody know if there is a sneaky way to stop it doing this. I say sneaky because there is nothing in the settings, but maybe there is a registry hack or otherwise that can fix this.