When I had Windows 7, I used this thread to add a functionality that lets me right click the desktop and click to find the background that is currently being used. However, ever since updating to Windows 8.1 I have not been able to add the same functionality by using the same technique.
I've navigated in regedit to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper, which gives me the following path: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\TranscodedWallpaper. When I put this path into FileExplorer it asks me to open the image using one of my image editors/viewers. When I do, it is the correct image, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the actual image's filepath so that I can delete the original photo. TranscodedWallpaper seems to update with each background change.
I know for a fact that all the backgrounds are found in D:\Users\MyUser\Pictures\Backgrounds (Windows is on the C drive), but there are about 1.4k images so looking through them each time for the image would be too much of a hassle.
So, how can I add this functionality back to my setup? At the very least, how can I get the file path of the current background image?
Best Answer
Although this is now an old question, I thought it still worth making the following post. Until recently I’ve been running Windows 7 and a few years ago as an exercise had written a simple program running with a system tray icon to discover the path to the current desktop background image. When I upgraded to Windows 10 this no longer worked of course, so I went looking and found Ramesh Srinivasan's blog and John Dangerbrooks' scripts. As a result, I’ve updated my program to work for Windows 8 and beyond and to work for different images for multi-monitor environments, while also maintaining backwards compatibility with Windows 7.
I’m sharing this program with the wider community in case anyone else likes the idea of having this as a system tray tool. It is written in C# and requires .Net framework v4, and is available as separate .zip files for x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) environments. There’s no installer, it’s just a simple executable with a readme file. Personally I start it automatically using the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key, but I leave that detail to you. More details are in the readme.
The zip files are located here https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B2EA2CF6592EC937!839&authkey=!AMNZgrGbt9raflQ&ithint=folder%2czip. (The old short link http://1drv.ms/1OoQRti appears not to work any more - has Microsoft removed the ability to generate short links for OneDrive folders?)