Windows Photo Gallery is a photo management, image tagging and editing tool that comes free with Windows Vista. Beginning from Windows 7, the OS is bundled with Windows Photo Viewer instead, which has the editing capabilities of Windows Photo Gallery removed, and Windows Photo Gallery is now available as part of Windows Live Essentials software suite. Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Photo Viewer is the default association program in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 that is configured to handle and associated with a few picture file formats and extensions, such as .bmp Bitmap Image, ico Icon, .jfif, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, JPEG Image, .PNG PNG Image, .tif, .tiff TIFF Image, and .wdp Windows Media Photo, and you can set the program as the default program for more image file types.

When displaying and viewing photos in Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Photo Viewer, some monitors or LCD flat panel displays may have a strange problem in which the images will be shown with a orange or yellowish tinge in photos’ background, affecting the display natural color of pictures to become something like Sepia effect. The entire window on WPG appears to be colored in slightly yellowish tint, and is therefore appear darker, including the panels on either side of the photo display which which appear yellow on the desktop but are white in actual. The yellow tinted photos may also affect other default image viewer in Windows. In some case, the yellow tinge problem goes away when the photos are viewed in slideshow mode, or in some other image manipulation tool such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint or Paint.NET or photo management utility such as Google Picasa.

The symptom is likely to occur after update of incompatible monitor driver, especially on Samsung LCD flat panel monitor driver update via Windows Update. The cause for the error is the usage of incorrect color profile for the monitor in Color Management setting.

To solve the problem and restore normal colors in Windows Photo Viewer and/or Windows Photo Gallery, you can try one of the resolutions below. All actions will be done at Color Management tab, which is accessible by right click on Desktop, and select Personalize on the contextual menu. Click on Display Settings link in the Personalization menu. In the Display Settings window, click on Advanced Settings… button. Then click on Color Management tab, and finally click on Color Management… button. You will need to select (tick) Use my settings for this device to be able to remove, change or set new color profiles.

The first workaround is by removing any existing ICC or WCS color profiles that are been associated with all display devices or monitors. Else, you can also try to change the default color profile for your system’s monitor to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, simply by clicking on Add, and then select sRGB IEC61966-2.1 from the list of profiles installed on system. After adding, click Set as Default Profile button. Exit from all dialogs and reboot your computer, and the color problem on Windows Photo Gallery and/or Windows Photo Viewer is fixed.

If your system doesn’t have sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile under the ICC Profiles, you can download the color profile from ICC. Right click on each of the .icc files in the RGB Profiles and CMYK Profiles folders (or simply just the one you need to use) and click “Install Profile” on context menu to install the color profile to system.