A few weeks ago, I wrote about the mysteries of the hidden lock screen images in Windows 10 Technical Preview 2. Today, thanks to the efforts of a reader, I can tell you where you can find more of the hidden images, including some designed for smart phones and small tablets.
First, check out Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 Tip: Enable an Alternate Lock Screen Background for my initial confused foray into this topic. I still don’t know why Microsoft is making these images so hard to find, but at least now I can tell you where to find more of them. (Oddly, this process is still very volatile. I bet you see some different images than I did.)
This tip comes courtesy of Ian S.
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To find more lock screen images, open a File Explorer window and make sure you’re displaying hidden files and folders. (View tab, Options, View tab, “Show hidden files, folders, and drives.) Then, navigate to %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.ContentDeliveryManager_xxxxxxxx\LocalState\Assets\ where the “xxxxxxxx” is some string of letters and numbers (“8wekyb3d8bbwe” on my PC). You will see something like the following.
Copy all of those files to a new folder. And then rename each in turn, adding the “.jpg” (no quotes) extension. As you can see, they are all image files.
What I’ve found is that visiting a few different PCs provides access to more images. Which, again, is odd. Here’s the full set courtesy of Ian.
Hopefully someone can use this information to delve even deeper. I’m still confused by how this works. But now we’ve seen more lock screen images, at least.
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