How to set custom rotating images for the lock screen on Windows 10
Windows 10 lets you enable Spotlight for the images shown on your lock screen. Spotlight downloads images from Bing images and displays them as the wallpaper for your lock screen. Some of the Spotlight images are nice while others are not that great. If you want to set custom rotating images for the lock screen, you can do so pretty easily.
Custom rotating images for lock screen
When you change the desktop background on Windows 10, you have one of three options to choose from; a static image i.e., the Picture option, a slideshow, and a solid color. These options, minus the solid color one, are also available for the lock screen.
The first thing you need to do is create a new folder and put all the images that you want to use for the lock screen background in it. You can add more images to this folder whenever you want. In fact, if you have a script that downloads the images you want to use, you can direct it to save them to this folder.
Open the Settings app and go to the Personalization group of settings. Select the Lock Screen tab. Open the dropdown under Background and select Slideshow. You will see at least one folder listed under the dropdown and that will be the Pictures folder. Click the ‘Add a folder’ option and then select the folder that you created with all the images you want to use. That’s about it.
The lock screen will now cycle through the images in the folder. Unfortunately, you cannot select how often the images change but it is highly likely that they will change, at the very least, after 24 hours, if not longer.
Spotlight doesn’t fetch a new image everyday so it is highly likely that the slideshow for the lock screen will follow the same pattern.
There are some things you can change though. Click the Additional Slideshow settings option under the list of folders that are added for it. On the next screen, you should disable ‘Only use pictures that fit my screen’ if the images need to be scaled to fit it. You should also change the ‘Turn off screen after slideshow has played for’ option to 30 minutes (lowest time). You should also consider disabling the ‘When my PC is inactive, show the lock screen instead of turning off the screen’ option. This will allow the screen to be turned off as opposed to staying awake to display the slideshow.
