If you’re using Windows
10, you’ve probably noticed that the lock screen usually displays a really nice
background image that is automatically chosen from Bing and automatically sized
for your desktop screen. If you have a high-resolution monitor, the feature
works especially well.
On a 4K or WQHD
(2560×1440) monitor, the high-resolution images look absolutely great. The
feature is called Windows Spotlight and it’s an option in the Windows 10 Lock
Screen settings dialog.
The only problem is that
there is no easy or quick way to download the images to your computer. Nor is
there any way to use the Windows Spotlight feature for your desktop wallpaper.
You can choose from Slideshow, but it requires you to point to a
folder with pictures.
In this article, I’ll
show you how to get those pictures from Windows Spotlight onto your computer,
which you can then feed to the slideshow option for your desktop wallpaper.
If you’re not sure what
Windows Spotlight is or if it’s not enabled on your computer, you can click on
start and type in lock screen to bring up this dialog.
As you can see, the lock
screen images are really nice and change about every two days. Luckily, all of
the images that have been shown on your computer are actually already stored on
your system, albeit not in a very user-friendly way.
Find Windows Spotlight Images
The first step is to
find all the stored images on your Windows 10 system. To do this, you’ll need
to open Windows Explorer and click on the View tab.
Go ahead and check both
the File name extensions and Hidden items boxes.
Once you have done this, navigate to the following directory below, using your
own user account in place of username.
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets
You should see a bunch
of files in this folder if you have been using Windows Spotlight for some time.
Go ahead and click on the Size column to order the items by
file size.
The reason I mention
sorting by size is because some of the files in the folder are less than 50 KB
and are not the wallpaper images. You can just ignore those files. Now what you
want to do is create a new folder somewhere else on your drive that you will
use for the wallpaper images.
Select all the files
that are larger than 100KB or so and copy them to the new folder. To copy,
select the files and then hold right-click and drag the images to the second
Explorer window.
You’ll notice that it’ll
say “Move to Wallpapers”, which you can ignore since you’re holding down the
right-click button your mouse. When you let go, you’ll get another dialog,
however, saying the files can harm your computer.
You obviously can ignore
this since these are files that are already on your computer. The reason why
the message appears is because they are being moved from a system protected
hidden folder. Click OK and then you’ll be able to choose Copy here.
To make the images
viewable again, you have to right-click on them to rename them. Since you have
no idea what the photo will be, just give it a number for the name. You’ll also
have to add the file extension. The images are all going to be either .PNG or
.JPG, so try them in that order.
Once you rename the
file, go ahead and double-click on it to see if it opens in your default photo
viewer program. If it does, you’re good to go. If not, try the other file
extension. You should start seeing previews of the images in Explorer also as
you rename them. Some remain with the default image placeholder icon, but the
images load just fine.
That’s about all there
is to it. It’s not the simplest procedure by any means, but it’s not risky and
it’s fairly straight-forward. I suggest turning on Spotlight for a couple of
weeks and then grabbing all the images. The only downside here is that the folder
contents change often and it doesn’t keep a record of every single image ever
shown. It will delete some and replace them with newer images, so you might
have to repeat this procedure every couple of months.
Other Ways to Get Spotlight Images
If you feel that’s way
too much work for those images, you do have a couple of other choices. First,
you can spend a dollar and get the SpotBright app, which allows you to download the
Spotlight images in just two clicks.
The second way is even
easier. Someone has been nice enough to find each image used in Spotlight and
post it to Imgur. There are at least 200+ images in this album and
they are all full HD resolution images. Using the site, you have the advantage
of downloading a lot more of the Spotlight images than you’ll find in the
hidden folder.
A third way is to use a
clever PowerShell command. Even if you are non-technical, it’s very easy to run
and it’ll save you a lot of manual work. Just create a folder on your desktop
called Pics and then open PowerShell by clicking on Start and
typing in powershell.
Now just copy and paste
the following command into the PowerShell window and press Enter:
Get-ChildItem -Path $env:localappdata\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets | Copy-Item -dest {"$home\desktop\pics\" + $_.BaseName + ($i++) +".jpg" }
Open the Pics folder
on your desktop and voila! All the images from the LocalState/Assets folder
should be there. You’ll need to delete out the useless files, but otherwise it
saves you a lot of time. Enjoy!
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