Removing/Uninstalling Microsoft Store packages via PowerShell

I accidently started Microsoft Photos and it suddenly decided to download and install Photos Media Engine Add-on in the background. Very odd.

Don’t get me wrong Photos a nice application for looking at your pictures, but I don’t use it and I prefer digiKam for viewing my albums if anything. Also JPEGView is much more powerful when viewing individual images.

Anyway, what convinced me to remove it entirely is constantly switching my defaults and now oddly installing the add-on in the background. Especially one that seems to share possible personal pictures over to the internet without consent, but this is just speculation.

Either way, to remove it you can simply go to Settings > Apps, then find Microsoft Photos and click on advanced options to remove it. If that’s not doing the trick, I prefer PowerShell.

Removing packages using PowerShell

Start PowerShell by right clicking on the Start icon on your taskbar. Click PowerShell (Admin) and type the following cmdlet.

get-appxpackage *Microsoft.Windows.Photos* | remove-appxpackage

You can also remove other Microsoft Store Apps this way. For example type the command below which will list all the apps installed:

get-appxpackage

Can also narrow it down to certain keywords, such as all the apps that contain “gaming” within the Name field:

get-appxpackage *gaming*

Then copy the “Name” field exactly as written and replace Microsoft.Windows.Photos from the above example. Making sure to include the *’s.

Removing Xbox/Microsoft Gaming packages

Like mentioned above, if you search *gaming* or *xbox* you’ll find some bloatware that you can remove. I like to remove these.

get-appxpackage *Microsoft.GamingServices* | remove-appxpackage
get-appxpackage *Microsoft.GamingApp* | remove-appxpackage

Removing People Bar feature packages

get-appxpackage *Microsoft.People* | remove-appxpackage
get-appxpackage *Microsoft.Windows.PeopleExperienceHost* | remove-appxpackage

Removing Windows Search package

If like me, you use an alternative search software (Everything by voidtools) you may want to get rid of the Window Search features just to avoid wasting resources and indexing. There is more to it than this so I suggest looking into how to completely turn off indexing also as I did all of that before running this cmdlet so I cannot confirm if this does all of that just yet.

get-appxpackage *Microsoft.Windows.Search* | remove-appxpackage

If you get any permission errors

If you get a 0x80073CFA error and a message saying “This app is part of Windows and cannot be uninstalled on a per-user basis…” well you can stop there as these apps may genuinely be integrated enough to cause issues if you uninstall or you can bypass it and remove it or you can look at other ways, such as using Group Policy to disable or turn them off. These blocks were introduced by Microsoft’s recent Windows 10 updates. See links below for links (some methods may be out of date).

Windows App Cert Kit

If you go to start, and type and run ‘Windows App Cert Kit’ you are able to validate every app installed, sometimes this is useful to also see what apps are actually installed in a more visual way.

Links & References

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.