Windows 10 Technical Preview 2 Tip: Find More Hidden Lock Screen Images

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.

fe-01

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.

fe-02

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.

full-images

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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