From the beginning of November this year, Paint 3D will be no more, as Microsoft plans to remove it from the eponymous Store and stop updating it altogether. Once heralded as a modernised version of Paint we all deserved, the rapid decline in interest and use meant that it was only a matter of time before the inevitable would happen.
It might seem a little hard to believe but Microsoft’s Paint app has been part and parcel of every version of Windows, making it almost four decades old. However, in 2017 with the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft thought we could all do with a better version and gave us Paint 3D, with the main feature set being its support for 3D models and rendering.
But as Windows Central reports, despite having some genuinely good features, time is being called on the seven-year-old app and after November 4 2024, you won’t be able to download it from Microsoft Store, nor will it ever receive any future updates.
To be honest, the news shouldn’t come as any surprise, especially given that Microsoft itself has been rather keen on Paint of late, updating it with a background removal tool and a generative AI system last year, to name just a few of the recent changes.
Like many of my colleagues in the PC Gamer hardware team, I have a genuine fondness for Paint and routinely use it to do basic annotations, image format changes, resizing, and so on. For more complex work, I typically use GIMP (occasionally Photoshop) and when I worked in the field of engineering, anything 3D-related would involve firing up AutoCAD, Inventor, or Fusion 360.
What I’ve never needed was something that was only a piecemeal version of all of these tools and given Paint 3D’s swift consignment to software history, I strongly suspect I’m not the only one.
Windows 10 might still be the world’s most popular Microsoft operating system but that hasn’t saved the likes of Cortana and the Tips tool being quietly booted into netherspace. At least Paint 3D can join them with a sense of being quite useful and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some folks out there who will be sad to see it go.
