spotlight

Windows 10 comes with a neat little feature, Windows Spotlight — a new lock-screen experience.

With Windows Spotlight you get awesome lock screen wallpapers, as a personal recommendation. It is actually a service, that gets trained back-end to know what the user likes and dislikes to give you a better lock screen background next time. It even puts Cortana to work for you.

It looks into your Store download history and based on that suggests you apps from the Store right on your lock-screen. Of course, you can turn the feature off.

Surprisingly, even though the feature may seem pretty amazing to you, Microsoft has not put you in control of to download/save the spotlight images locally on your computer. But, it does SAVE them to a hidden location while it fetches them in the background every time you log on to your computer.

Let us see how to retrieve those saved pictures and determine which ones to keep.

How to Save Spotlight Images on Windows 10

  1. Browse to this location on your PCC:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy
    \LocalState\Assets    replace ‘username’ field with the appropriate name
  2. In the Assets folder, you will see a lot of files(if you ever used Windows Spotlight), with random filenames and there is no extension to determine what type of the files are they actually. But we will add extension to them, all of them, on a command line. They are not going to stay there forever, let me tell you.
  3. Copy all of them by pressing Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C and paste them in a folder of your choice, may be on desktop, with a familiar name(say Spotlight).
  4. Open the newly created folder (Spotlight) right away, press and hold SHIFT key + right click towards an empty space. Select “Open command window here“.
  5. Type the following command and press Enter. This will add .jpg extension to each and every file in the Spotlight folder.
    ren * *.jpg
  6. Once completed, you will notice the type field displaying files as jpg images. Now comes the cool part. The images you want are the ones which are either suitable for desktop or your mobile device. So, the dimensions matter. If you notice in the current folder, there is no dimensions column for narrowing down the search, but we will add one.Right click in the column area and click more from the options. Scroll down and check-mark dimensions from the list. Click OK to close the window.
  7. You will quickly notice the dimensions of interest. For instance, 1920x1080 belong to desktop PC, similarly for mobile it is 1080x1920 pixels. This way, you can narrow down the search and only keep the pictures you need. You can delete the rest of them.

I hope this tutorial will help you finding and saving your favorite lock screen wallpapers to your hard drive on the Computer. Please share the article if you find it helpful.

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