If you have a 4K or WQHD monitor, you can use Windows Spotlight to see high-resolution images in the Windows 10 Lock Screen settings dialog. This feature is called “Windows Spotlight.”
There is no easy or quick way to download the images to your computer. Nor is there any way to use the Windows Spotlight feature for your desktop wallpaper. You can choose from Slideshow, but it requires you to point to a folder with pictures.
To get pictures from Windows Spotlight onto your computer, follow these steps:
- Open Windows Spotlight by clicking the Start button and typing “spotlight” into the search bar.
- Click on the first picture that appears in the search results.
- Right-click on the picture and select “Save Picture As.”
- Navigate to where you want to save the picture and click on the file icon to save it to your computer. ..
Windows Spotlight is a feature of Windows 10 that allows you to search for files and photos on your computer. If it’s not enabled, you can click on start and type in lock screen to bring up this dialog. ..
The lock screen images on your computer are really nice and change every two days. Unfortunately, all of the images that have been shown on your computer are actually already stored on your system, albeit not in a very user-friendly way.
Find Windows Spotlight Images
Once you’ve opened Explorer, click on the Storage tab. You’ll see a list of all the images that are stored on your Windows 10 system. To find and delete any images from this list, you’ll need to use the following steps:
- Click on the image you want to delete.
- Click on the Delete button.
- Type “x” in the text field and click on the Delete button.
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs Once in this directory, open the file “StartupFolder.lnk” with your own user account. This will open a folder that contains all of the startup programs that are set to run when you start your computer. To check for file name extensions, navigate to the following directory below, using your own user account in place of username: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow<random>.exe To check for hidden items, navigate to the following directory below, using your own user account in place of username: C:\Users<random>.cache ..
If you have been using Windows Spotlight for some time, you will likely see a bunch of files in this folder. Go ahead and click on the Size column to order the items by file size. ..
I wanted to mention that some of the files in my folder are smaller than 50 KB and are not the wallpaper images. You can just ignore them. However, I want to create a new folder on my drive for the wallpaper images.
To copy files to the new folder, select the files and then hold right-click and drag them to the second Explorer window.
You can ignore the dialog and keep using the left-click button to move the wallpaper to your desktop.
You can ignore this message because the files are already on your computer. The reason why the message appears is because they are being moved from a system protected hidden folder. Click OK and then you’ll be able to choose Copy here. ..
To make the images viewable again, you need to rename them. Since you don’t know what the photo will be, just give it a number for the name. You’ll also have to add the file extension. The images are all going to be either .PNG or .JPG, so try them in that order. ..
If you rename a file and it doesn’t open in your default photo viewer program, try renaming the file extension and see if that helps. Some files still have the default image placeholder icon, but they load just fine when you rename the extension.
This is a straightforward process that can be done in a couple of weeks, but it can be time-consuming. I suggest turning on Spotlight for a couple of weeks and then grabbing all the images. The only downside is that the folder contents change often and it doesn’t keep a record of every single image ever shown. It will delete some and replace them with newer images, so you might have to repeat this procedure every couple of months.
Other Ways to Get Spotlight Images
Or, you could try using the Google Photos app to take pictures of what you want to share and then use the Google Photos app to post them on social media.
The second way is much easier. Someone has been kind enough to find each image used in Spotlight and post it to Imgur. There are at least 200+ images in this album and they are all full HD resolution images. Using the site, you have the advantage of downloading a lot more of the Spotlight images than you’ll find in the hidden folder.
The third way is to use a PowerShell command. Even if you are not technical, it’s very easy to run and it’ll save you a lot of manual work. Just create a folder on your desktop called Pics and then open PowerShell by clicking on Start and typing in powershell.
Get-ChildItem -Path “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion” -Filter “Name=‘MyApp’” This command retrieves all the child items in the C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows NT/CurrentVersion folder. The Name=‘MyApp’ parameter is used to filter the results.
The LocalState/Assets folder on your desktop contains all the images from your local state’s assets folder. You’ll need to delete out the useless files, but otherwise it saves you a lot of time.