Windows 8 – How to Remove Live Tile Updates

Apparently the photos are selected from your library by some criteria that includes recentness, You can set one specific photo by bringing up the picture to being full screen, then bring up the app command bar( ctrl - Z , and selecting 'set as app tile'. Source: Tom's Hardware

As is there's no obvious way to select folders, so I'd guess the solution would be to store things you don't want turning up outside the library. Tweaking metadata to reduce interestingness might work as well, but thats an extraordinarily ugly solution, and one that would need further understanding of the criteria the app uses.

EDIT: Further investigation shows it uses your pictures library, and by adding a folder to your pictures library it shows up there. Likewise removing a library removes it from the 'playlist'. Quite simply the way to remove a folder from showing up on the photos tile is to remove it from the library, and adding a folder to the library adds it to the tile.

There does seem to be a certain amount of 'lag' between changes in the library structure, and photos catching on with it.

Because the amount of traffic caused by live tile updates differs from app to app, just check the numbers in the task manager:

In my personal experience, the traffic caused by live tiles is negligible. If you're using apps that show images in their live tiles and those images change frequently, those tiles might cause a significant amount of traffic. You can keep an eye on the traffic caused by live tile updates in the task manager and disable apps that download too much content. Just right click on the app and select Turn live tile off:

Whether you need to disable the live tiles for an app totally depends on your traffic plan and the advantage you gain from the tiles. For example, you certainly want to disable an app that wastes 100 MB of your traffic budget per month just for live tiles.