How To Find Synced Wallpapers On Windows 10
If you use multiple Windows 10 systems, and you’ve connected your Microsoft account on all the machines you use, you can sync your settings across devices. When you sync settings, one of the many things that are synced is your wallpaper. This means that if you find a nice wallpaper and set it as your background on your work system, it will sync to your home system. This is all great but if you ever need to find the synced wallpapers on a system, you can. Windows 10 saves them to a temporary location. Here’s where you can find them.
Synced Wallpapers On Windows 10
The quickest way to view all synced wallpapers on Windows 10 is to open the run box with the Win+R keyboard shortcut. In the run box, enter the following. You can also enter it in the location bar in File Explorer.
%localappdata%\microsoft\windows\themes\roamedthemefiles
This will open File Explorer and you will see a ‘DesktopBackground’ folder. Inside this folder, you will see all your synced wallpapers. They will be in BMP format.
You shouldn’t move any files from this folder unless you do not intend to use them. If you move the files, and one of them is still in use, you will end up with a black wallpaper.
Windows 10 keeps a copy of every wallpaper that you use. It won’t have a copy of every single wallpaper ever but it will have a reasonably long history of them. It keeps this history so that, in the event you accidentally delete the original wallpaper file, your won’t lose your desktop background. It also keeps a temporary backup of all the Windows 10 Spotlight images as well and you can move them to a permanent location if you want.
The synced wallpaper is in reasonably good quality. Windows 10 doesn’t downgrade the quality too much. The BMP files are large so you know you aren’t getting a horrible, pixelated image. Once you have the image, you can share it with someone who might have asked for it, use the image for something else, or use it as the wallpaper on a local account.
Wallpapers take a little time to sync between different systems. If you’ve recently changed a wallpaper on one system and it hasn’t synced to your new system, give it a few minutes. Also, if you shut your system down the second you changed your wallpaper, it may not have uploaded to Windows’ servers where it is then supposed to sync to your other system. The transition isn’t seamless but it’s not too choppy.
