Save your favorite backgrounds to a local drive

Mar 24, 2018 19:38 GMT  ·  By

After we recently discussed how to reset Windows Spotlight in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, there’s another key aspect of this feature that many users seem to be interested in: saving the wallpapers that Microsoft uses on the lock screen.

Before getting to the actual tutorial, it’s important to describe how Windows Spotlight works. Introduced in Windows 10, this particular OS functionality automatically sets a new lock screen wallpaper every day if a connection to Internet exists.

To do this, Windows Spotlight connects to Bing, Microsoft’s search platform, and downloads the Bing homepage of the day background to use it on your lock screen. Only high-quality photos are being used, and they come with helpful information like location where it was taken and other trivia details that many of us enjoy reading.

Since these photos are downloaded to be used on your system, they must be stored somewhere, right? This is exactly how Windows Spotlight works. The better thing for us is that after replacing wallpapers, the old ones aren’t deleted, so you can save them manually and create your own collection of wallpapers to use them at a later time.

Windows Spotlight in Windows 10 Settings

Doing this is not at all difficult, though it involves several important steps, including working with Command Prompt. An administrator account is needed.

First and foremost, you need to find the location of the wallpapers on your system. This can be done by simply copying the path below in the File Explorer address bar and hitting Enter:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets After doing this, File Explorer should point you to a folder called Assets that includes a long list of files without an extension. These are the wallpapers downloaded by Windows Spotlight, but since it’s bundled into the operating system, this feature can read the photos no matter if they have an extension or not.
Default Windows Spotlight saving folder

The next step is copying all files to a different folder on your system. This is necessary because the Assets folder is a protected system directory and doing any kind of operation here is by default restricted. So copy all files to a different folder, which I’m going to call Wallpapers.

Now your Wallpapers folder should have the exact same contents as the Assets folder. In order to actually see the photos, you have to add the JPG extension to each of them. While you can obviously start renaming each file manually, there’s a much easier way to do this, and it involves Command Prompt. Using this method, you can add the JPG extension to all files automatically, without wasting your time doing this manually for each item individually.

Press Shift + right click in the folder and hit the option that’s called Open Command Prompt window here. Next, type the following command in the app:

ren *.* *.jpg This command will add the JPG extension at the end of each file in the Wallpapers folder. The process could take a while depending on the number of files in the folder, but it typically needs just a few seconds to come to an end.
Renaming files in Command Prompt

Once the JPG extension is being added, you should start seeing thumbnails in your Wallpapers folder. These let you preview the photos just like in a typical folder with images. The difference here is that some files won’t have a thumbnail because they’re just temporary items that Windows Spotlight generated, so you can safely remove these to keep only your wallpapers.

After the cleaning comes to an end, you should have a folder full of wallpapers downloaded by Windows Spotlight. If you wish, you can configure this folder to be the default wallpaper source for your lock screen, though this means that no addition pics would be downloaded by Windows Spotlight.

Photo Gallery (4 Images)

Windows 10 lock screen
Windows Spotlight in Windows 10 SettingsDefault Windows Spotlight saving folder
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