If you’re using Windows 10, you’ve probably noticed that the lock screen usually displays a really nice background image that is automatically selected by Bing and automatically adjusts to fit your desktop screen. If you have a high-resolution monitor, this feature works especially well.
High-resolution images look great on a 4K or WQHD (2560 × 1440) monitor. This feature is called Windows Spotlight and can be selected from the Windows 10 Lock Screen Settings dialog box.
The only problem is that there is no easy or quick way to download images to your computer. There is also no way to use the Windows Spotlight feature for your desktop wallpaper. You can select a slideshow, but you need to specify a folder with images.
In this article, I will show you how to transfer these images from Windows Spotlight to your computer, which can then be used as a slideshow for your desktop wallpaper.
If you don’t know what Windows Spotlight is or is not enabled on your computer, you can click on the Start button and enter the lock screen to open this dialog box.
As you can see, the lock screen images are really good and change about every two days. Fortunately, all the images that were shown on your computer are actually already saved on your system, although not in a very user-friendly way.
Search for Windows Spotlight Pictures
The first step is to find all the saved images on your Windows 10 system. To do this, you need to open Windows Explorer and go to the View tab.
Go ahead and check the File name extensions and Hidden items boxes. Once you’ve done that, navigate to the next directory below using your account instead of your username.
C: Users username AppData Local Packages Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy LocalState Assets
You should see several files in this folder if you’ve been using Windows Spotlight for a while. Go ahead and click the Size column to arrange items by file size.
The reason I mention sorting by size is because some of the files in the folder are less than 50KB in size and are not wallpaper images. You can simply ignore these files. Now you need to create a new folder in a different location on your disk that you will use for the wallpaper.
Select all files larger than 100KB and copy them to a new folder. To copy, select the files and, while holding down the mouse button, drag the images into the second explorer window.
You will notice that the text “Move to wallpaper” appears, which you can ignore as you hold down the right mouse button. When you release the button, another dialog box appears, saying that the files can harm your computer.
You can obviously ignore this as these are files that are already on your computer. This message appears because they are being moved from a hidden system-protected folder. Click “OK” and then select “Copy Here”.
To make the images viewable again, you need to right-click them to rename. Since you don’t know what the photo will be, just give it a number as a name. You will also need to add the file extension. All images will be in .PNG or .JPG format, so try them in the order shown.
After renaming a file, double click on it to see if it opens in your default photo viewer. If so, go ahead. If not, try a different file extension. You should start to see a preview of the images in the explorer as well when you rename them. Some remain with the default image placeholder icon, but images load fine.
That’s all. This is by no means the easiest procedure, but it is not dangerous and quite simple. I suggest turning on Spotlight for a couple of weeks and then copying all the images. The only drawback here is that the contents of the folder change frequently, and there is no record of every image ever shown. It will remove some and replace them with newer images, so you may have to repeat this procedure every couple of months.
Other ways to get great photos
If you think this is too much for these images, you have several other options. First, you can spend a dollar and get the SpotBright app, which lets you download Spotlight images in just two clicks.
The second way is even easier. Someone was kind enough to find every image used in Spotlight and post it to Imgur. There are at least 200+ images in this album, and all of them are Full HD images. Using this site, you can upload many more Spotlight images than you will find in the hidden folder.
The third way is to use the smart PowerShell command. Even if you don’t have technical knowledge, it is very easy to operate and it will save you a lot of manual work. Just create a folder on your desktop called Pics, and then open PowerShell by clicking Start and typing in PowerShell.
Now just copy and paste the following command into a 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 images from the LocalState / Assets folder should be there. You will need to delete unnecessary files, but otherwise it will save you a lot of time. Enjoy!
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