Windows – How to activate and deactivate Windows 10 lock screen spotlight hints

To save the Spotlight images stored on your computer, see this procedure in this article:
How to save Windows Spotlight lockscreen images so you can use them as wallpapers.

To download almost all Spotlight images from Microsoft servers in a few minutes in high-resolution, see the SpotBright app.

Once you have the images, you can scan them for metadata that may contain information about where they came from.

There are various mechanisms for embedding metadata in images : IPTC, EXIF, XMP. This metadata is the only textual data contained inside the image.

EXIF is stored in the image by the camera and may contain information such as the GPS coordinates (if the camera has GPS, which most smartphones do). IPTC and XMP are added manually, as is normally done by professional photographers.

The best tool I have found for displaying that information is the free Picture Information Extractor. Try this tool on one of these downloaded images to see if Microsoft has kept some of that data or scrubbed it out.

If you have found such a useful tag(s), there exist image renamers that can use metadata tags to batch-rename the images.

It appears that at some point in the last year or two, the "Get fun facts" checkbox is no longer honored when you switch back to the Windows Spotlight option.

I have two Windows 10 machines, both build 1803. Both are set to use Windows Spotlight on the lock screen, but the older one does not show the tips and advertisements while the new one does. This was driving me crazy so I decided to dig into it, and I found this question while looking for an answer.

There are some non-GPO registry settings related to "subscribed content" in Windows 10 and one of these appears to control the lock screen tips. Under the key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ContentDeliveryManager

Set the DWORD value ContentDeliveryAllowed to 1.
Set the DWORD value RotatingLockScreenEnabled to 1.
Set the DWORD value RotatingLockScreenOverlayEnabled to 0.
Set the DWORD value SubscribedContent-338387Enabled to 0.

Why this works:

ContentDeliveryAllowed must be enabled for any of the dynamic content to work and should be enabled by default unless you've turned it off with policy. RotatingLockScreenEnabled enables the dynamic background picture instead of a static one. RotatingLockScreenOverlayEnabled is the "Get fun facts" option in the Settings app and setting it to 0 disables it.

Each of the SubscribedContent values appears to control a different part of the Windows UI, such as the start menu, taskbar, notifications area, etc., and 338387 seems to be the one for showing tips on the lock screen.