A picture in Desktop Minder opens to be looked at, on its Look tab, and is changed on purpose, on its Change tab. Looking is done. Changing works, and works differently from the editors people know: four tools, no Filters menu, and everything you can do on the right-click menu of whatever you pointed at—a color, a selection, the whole picture. What it can't do yet is add much to a picture: a selection can be filled with a color, but there's no brush to paint with, no text, and no layers.

Where It Stands

Looking

Double-click a picture and it opens on Look, fitted to the View and centered on a near-black ground, and never blown up past its own size. Double-click it for one to one, with scrollbars. Most pictures are only ever looked at, so nothing about the editor is allowed to make looking any slower or any different.

JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, TIFF and icons open this way, and so do the HEIC and AVIF pictures phones take, which Windows itself can't always read. The Properties panel gives the size and format, and a folder of photographs can show the camera's own facts in its listing: date taken, dimensions, camera, F-stop, exposure time, ISO speed, focal length, rating and tags. Every picture is its own icon in panes and listings, and the Viewer panel shows one you've only selected.

A picture's menu has the commands you'd expect to find on it: Set as Desktop Background; Set as Album Cover, when there's music in the same folder; Create Icon; and Convert to, which makes a copy in another format beside it.

Changing

Four Tools

There is no Filters menu and no wall of tools. A click means one of four things, and the toolbar is four buttons, in words rather than pictures, because "Freehand" says what it does and a lasso has to be learned: Point, which moves the picture around; Box and Freehand, which select (Shift adds, Alt takes away); and Brush, which paints the selection on, or off with Alt, with [ and ] to change its size. The mouse wheel zooms around the pointer, from two percent to sixty-four hundred; the middle button, or Space and a drag, moves the picture; Ctrl+0 fits it and Ctrl+1 shows it one to one. Past one to one, pixels are drawn as the squares they are, and see-through parts show a checkerboard. A selection shows as marching ants over a blue tint.

A Menu About What You Pointed At

What can be done is on the right-click menu of whatever you point at, and the menu is headed by it, in plain words: This dark blue, with a chip of the color, or The selection, or The whole picture. (Plain words, because nobody right-clicks a pixel expecting to be told it is "Cornsilk.")

• A color offers Select All Like This..., Select This Patch..., Replace With... and Make See-Through....
• The selection offers Select Nothing, Select Everything Else, Grow..., Shrink... and Soften the Edge...; then Fill With..., Make See-Through, Crop to It, Make Gray, Invert the Colors and Brightness and Contrast...; then Copy.
• The whole picture offers Select Everything, Make Gray, Invert the Colors, Brightness and Contrast..., Flip Left to Right, Flip Top to Bottom, Turn Left, Turn Right and Resize....

Below those, under their own names, come the picture's file and the folder it's in, each offering exactly what it offers anywhere else—not a copy of that menu, but the same one, which is why the two can never drift apart. A command with dots asks something first, in one small window that sits in the corner of the picture rather than in the middle, where it would cover the very pixels whose change it's previewing; Show on the picture previews the change in place. A command that can't be done is grayed, with the reason as its tip. Making part of a JPEG see-through, for instance, is refused before you start, with "Convert it to PNG first," because the honest thing is to say so before the work is done. And every change to the colors fades out across a selection's softened edge, rather than stopping at a staircase of pixels.

What Has Been Done

The history isn't a pile of snapshots. Twenty undos of a twelve-megapixel photograph kept as copies would come to a gigabyte, so instead the picture on screen is the picture as it was opened, replayed through every change made since. That makes undo cheap, and it allows something the big editors don't quite have: a change made ten minutes ago can be taken out on its own. (Not quite any change: a crop, a turn or a resize stays once later steps have worked on a selection, because those steps were made on the picture at the size it left.) The picture's menu shows Undo and Redo by name ("Undo: filled with blue"), and What Has Been Done lists every step, each with Go Back to Here or Redo Up to Here, and Take This Step Out. There's also Back to How It Was Opened. The history lasts as long as the picture stays open.

No Save Button

A photograph is written back when it's put down—when you open something else, close it, or switch desktops—or at once, with Write the Changes Now. A line on the toolbar always says whether there are changes waiting to be written, because a photograph is the one thing people most need to know that about. And since a photograph is overwritten the moment somebody switches desktops, writing it is done carefully:

• Nothing is lost for good. Before the first change is written, the original is kept, as Sunset (before changes).jpg, in the Recycle Bin, or beside the picture on a drive that has no Recycle Bin.
• Nothing is ever half written. The new picture is written to a file of its own first, and swapped in only when it's complete.
• Nothing the camera wrote is thrown away. The date, the camera, the color profile and the rest go into the new file, and a JPEG keeps the quality it was saved with, though never less than 75.

Some pictures can be looked at but not changed, and the Change tab says why: icons, pictures with several frames, motion photos, read-only files, and pictures with more than eight bits to each color.

Not Yet

• Painting with a brush, text, shapes and layers.
• Turning by any angle but a quarter turn, and adjustments other than Make Gray, Invert the Colors, and Brightness and Contrast.
• Cropping to anything but a selection, and resizing to an exact size rather than a percentage. For now, the file's Resize... hands the picture to PowerToys' Image Resizer, if it's installed.
• Writing the changes to a copy, rather than back to the picture itself.
• Zooming on the Look tab.
• Camera RAW files and SVG drawings, which will each get a document of their own.

Putting Things Together

Pictures already go places. On the Change tab, drag from inside a selection with Point and you carry off a copy of what's selected—the pixels themselves, with everything around them see-through and the soft edges faded—and the picture is left untouched. Drop it on a folder and it becomes a new picture file there; drop it on a contact's photo, or into another program that takes pictures. Copy puts the same thing on the clipboard. Elsewhere in the program, every place a picture belongs takes a picture file dropped on it: a desktop's background, an album's cover on the tag sheet, a contact's photo, the icon library. A frame of a film comes out as a picture, with Copy Image.

An open picture takes nothing dropped on it yet; try, and it says so. That's the next frontier. Text dropped on a picture should become a layer of words on it, and a picture dropped on a picture a layer of its own—which means layers come first, and the editor's design for them hasn't been written. Further off, a frame is a picture, so one day this editor will be able to work on a frame of a video, or a whole scene, without needing a new idea.

Progress

• By 26 September 2026—Look and Change were already built, with the editor's step-by-step history and its careful writing.
• 26 September—The design of the video editor makes "a frame is a picture" part of the plan, and puts one shared history for the picture editor and the video editor on the road ahead.
• By 1 October, when the project's detailed history begins—Everything described above under Looking and Changing.
• 1 October—A selection can be dragged out as a picture of its own (Copy already put it on the clipboard), and dropped on a folder, a contact, or another program; and every place in the program a picture belongs takes a picture file dropped on it, under the same shared rules.