How to Save Spotlight Wallpapers to Desktop in Windows 10

Windows Spotlight feature shows beautiful Wallpapers on Windows 10 lock screen. You can enable this feature in Settings if it is not already enabled and enjoy awesome wallpapers on your lock screen from all around the world. And you can also save these spotlight wallpapers to your desktop if you wish to use them as desktop background in Windows 10.

However, these Windows Spotlight wallpapers are well hidden in system folders inside your Windows 10 installation. And they are also saved in unrecognizable format, so, we need to put some efforts before we can save them to desktop. But the process is very simple and straightforward and you don’t require to use any tool for doing this.

SEE ALSO: How to Change Login Screen Background in Windows 11 and Windows 10?

Find and Save Windows Spotlight Lock Screen Wallpapers to Desktop

Before we move on to detailed steps, let’s check this video tutorial for finding and saving Windows spotlight images in Windows 10.

Let’s see how to find Windows spotlight wallpapers in Windows 10. After that we will save them to a folder on Desktop or any other folder. Just follow these simple steps.

Step 1: Enable Windows Spotlight

First of all, make sure you have enabled Windows Spotlight already. But if you haven’t enabled them yet, you can enabled them in Settings > Personalization > Lock screen.

After enabling Windows spotlight, you will see new Wallpaper on your lock screen every time you logon or lock your Windows 10 PC. Here is an example of Spotlight wallpaper.

Let’s start digging for these beautiful wallpapers.

Step 2: Go to the Location of Spotlight Wallpapers in Windows 10

The Windows spotlight wallpaper images are hidden deep down in Windows drive. And the path is also not very easy to remember either. So, here is full path of spotlight folder in File Explorer. You can also simply copy and paste it in the address bar of File Explorer.

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets

If the path mentioned above doesn’t work for you, make sure to replace %USERNAME% with your actual username.

Once you are in Assets folder, you will see list of randomly named files without any file extensions. We will now copy all of them and save to a folder on Desktop. So, select all of them and right-click on them. You might see a warning saying, “These files might be harmful to your computer“, simply click OK to continue.

After that, you will see right-click menu, select Copy to copy the selected items.

Step 3: Copy Spotlight Images to Desktop

You can minimize this folder after copying the files. After that, go to Desktop and create a new folder. To create a new folder on Desktop, right-click in blank space and select New > Folder. You can give any name to this folder or you can leave it as it is. However, in this tutorial, we have named the folder as SpotlightWallpapers.

Now, paste all copied spotlight wallpapers in this folder.

Step 4: Delete Smaller Files

After pasting all the files in new folder on Desktop, you will notice that some files have size smaller than 100KB, these files are icons and other smaller images used in Microsoft Store Apps. You can delete them without any issues. It will be easy to delete smaller files by sorting them by size.

So, sort all files by size and delete files smaller than 100 KB in size. After that you will have only Windows spotlight wallpapers that you can save to any folder on desktop or somewhere else.

Step 5: Rename File Extensions to JPG

After deleting smaller files, you will have Wallpaper files only. But all the files here are without any extensions. All these files are actually JPG files, you just have to add .jpg extension to all of these files to view them. Without .JPG extension, these spotlight wallpapers will not be viewable on your Windows 10 PC.

So, we are going to use a CMD command to add “.jpg” extensions to all files inside the folder. But first, you need to open command prompt in this folder. After that type following command to change extensions of all files in that folder.

ren *.* *.jpg

Explanation:

Step 6: Save Windows Spotlight Wallpapers for Desktop and Mobile

You can now close the Command Prompt. Go back to the folder, you can see the thumbnails of all the files. If you don’t see thumbnails, make sure to change view to large tiles. Double-click on any of them to view it in larger size. You will notice that there are two types of images

1. Landscape Wallpapers for Desktop PC and
2. Portrait Wallpapers for your phone.

Step 7: Find and Save Windows Spotlight Images using Ubuntu Bash Shell

As you might know that you can also use Ubuntu in Windows 10 via Windows Subsystem for Linux. So, you can also use Ubuntu Shell to extract Windows Spotlight images or wallpapers and save them to desktop. Use following commands on Ubuntu Bash Shell. Make sure to replace $USERNAME with your actual Ubuntu username.

$ cd /mnt/c/Users/$USERNAME
$ d=Desktop/Spotlight-Images
$ mkdir $d
$ cp AppData/Local/Packages/*Content*/LocalState/Assets/* $d
$ cd $d
$ for ff in *;do mv $ff $ff.jpg;done

Save Windows Spotlight Wallpapers to Desktop and Use them as Desktop Background in Windows 10

Now, you have got a 2 in 1 package – Desktop and Mobile wallpapers. You can use these wallpapers as your Desktop background as well as your phone’s background wallpaper. Since, Windows 10 will keep downloading new wallpapers regularly, you can check the Windows Spotlight folder and save new images to your Desktop.

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