Dave, my grandson just gave me his old Windows PC and it works pretty well, but for some reason the wallpaper is a solid color. It’s boring! How can I make it something more lively and visually appealing?
There’s a fine line between allowing lots of customizations and creating a standardized appearance for software, and nowhere is that more important than in an operating system. Sure, you can download various programs that “hack” the interface elements and change window frames, icons, cursors, etc., but most of those are unsafe (and all too often include malware) and can break other interface elements. Still, who wants a boring computer when you likely spend hours each day staring at the screen?
Like most operating systems, Windows ships with a very small selection of images you can use as wallpaper and you can also download just about any image you want to use too (Google Image Search is your friend in this regard!). But there are also a couple of ways that Microsoft offers photo of the day options too, typically gorgeous photographs of exotic locations. Let’s have a look…
BORING WALLPAPER, BE GONE!
Let’s start out with the easy stuff. In solidarity, I’ve set my background wallpaper to a solid grey. Definitely not very visually exciting:
Go to Settings from here (you can search for it in the Toolbar search box or find it in the Start Menu) and choose “Personalization“:
Microsoft separates out Themes from Backgrounds, but the non-visual components of themes seem to have reduced over the years, so I view the first six options as just different backgrounds. Click on one and the screen immediately changes.
But let’s go further. Click on the “>” adjacent to “Background“:
Notice the preview shows that I’ve selected one of the theme options. An improvement!
WINDOWS PICTURE OF THE DAY
The key option on this window is “Personalize your background”. Click on “Slideshow” and you’ll see that there are four options:
“Picture” lets you choose your own image for your wallpaper, “Solid color” is, well, you can figure it out. “Slideshow” allows you to pick a folder of images and have it automatically cycle between them (great for vacation photos!), but it’s the last one we want to consider: “Windows spotlight“.
Choose it and you’ll get the Microsoft Windows picture of the day show up as your new wallpaper:
Gorgeous, right? And notice that on the top right there’s a link “Learn about this picture” if you ever want to get more information on the image it’s selected.
OR YOU CAN USE BING FOR YOUR IMAGES
The other option for a photo of the day wallpaper is to use Bing. Yes, everyone’s favorite search engine (well, maybe not everyone) includes image search, so it’s a natural to have a utility that lets you opt to have Bing’s image of the day be your wallpaper too. Simply click on the link “Getting new wallpapers every day from Microsoft” in the Settings window (above)…
This opens up your Web browser to Bing Wallpaper, which immediately downloads its installer:
Tip: Mac users, notice that there’s a “MacOS” link along the top of this page too. You can also have Bing Wallpaper as your MacOS desktop image if you’d like!
The installer and program are both pretty small so it’s a very fast download. Then click on “Open file” from the browser download window and it’ll fire up the Bing Wallpaper installer. Click on “Install” and it’ll do its thing…
After a short period of time, maybe 10-15 seconds, it’ll replace the above with this:
Yes, you can have the default background in new tabs and windows in your browser come from the same Bing Wallpapers utility if you want. You can also switch your default search engine to Bing. Do you want to? Your call. I clicked on “No thanks“, and…
Another big change. What’s interesting is that there’s no “Learn about this picture” link on the top right, but instead the Microsoft Bing logo as a watermark on the lower right, and this notification:
This indicates that Bing Wallpaper is a utility that’s going to sit in your system tray (the right portion of the Taskbar), probably ignored. You can click on it if you want, however, in which case you’ll get information about the image:
You can see that it also makes switching to a different image, if you don’t like today’s photo, quite simple.
That’s it. Between these various options you should never have to look at a dull wallpaper or background ever again!
Pro tip: I’ve been writing about Microsoft Windows for many years. Please check out my extensive and well-documented Windows help area for over a thousand useful tutorials while you’re visiting the site!