Windows – the location of lock screen images on Windows 10

desktop-customizationimageswindows 10windows-spotlight

Where, or what format, are the images used by Windows 10 when logged out or in lock-screen?

I searched the entire drive for *.jpg, *.bmp, *.png, and *.tif but the one I was looking for did not appear.

At first glance, Path to current desktop backgrounds in Windows 10?, although not exactly a duplicate, appeared to have the path I wanted. But when I went there, the pre-login image was there, but the lock-screen image was not. (And contrary to the claim in that answer, the files there did have extensions.)

UPDATE: I just did a lockscreen, and got an image that IS in that directory, but earlier today, it was consistently an image of an interesting footbridge that is not in that directory.

Best Answer

If you are not finding the images in the typical locations, you likely have Windows Spotlight turned on. Spotlight offers random images on the lock screen, as well as other features.

These Windows Spotlight images aren’t stored in the same location as regular Windows wallpaper, however, so here’s how you can find them.

The images are hidden deep, so you will need to change settings before you can view them. To do this, open File Explorer and go to the View tab. On the far right is an Options button, click it.

In the window that opens, select the View tab. Under Advanced Settings, select Show hidden files, folders and drives, then click Apply and then OK to close the open window.

Now it is time to navigate to the following directory (which was hidden before).

This PC > C: > Users > [Your User Name] > AppData > Local > Packages > Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy > LocalState > Assets

In this directory you will see a bunch of files without extensions. These are the incognito image files. These are jpeg images of various resolutions to meet the needs of multiple devices screen sizes. You can copy the files to another location and rename them to have the jpeg extension, then you can open them with your default image viewer.

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