Photo Viewer and GIFs

So, I noticed that when I wanted to associate gifs with the photo viewer that the photo viewer was not selectable (as in, not displayed as a choice). We all know photo viewer in 7 is not an selectable executable program. I don't want to use a browser; that's dumb as hell. I'm not typing about specifically gif animations either. I like my gifs static.

I went to the internets to see what everyone had to say and saw many others had this unresolved problem.

I gave up trying to figure it out and just wanted to add paint.net as an option to open gifs with. After I did this, photo viewer was available to choose as the default gif viewer.

This is a bug, am I right? That silly Windows...

nickle said:

You can set program associations in the control panel/default programs.

You can also right click the gif file and choose the default program to open the file.

I just want to clear up that I could not associate files this way until I manually added another program to the list. Photo Viewer did not show up in the list until after I added Paint.net. After I selected paintdotnet.exe (I think that's it.) as the program I wished to open a gif with as a single instance; Photo Viewer along with the other applications shown in your second image (right hand), became instantly available to select.