Monday 20 May 2013

39. Use Any Photo as Your Desktop Wallpaper


Windows offers a standard way of changing the wallpaper picture shown on your desktop: you right-click a blank space on the desktop and choose Personalize (in Windows 8/7/Vista) or Properties (in XP), select Desktop Background (or Desktop in Windows XP) and choose the picture you want to use.

But perhaps you’re approaching this from a different direction: perhaps you’re looking through your photos and you come across one that would look good as your desktop wallpaper. If so, there’s no need to go mucking around with the steps above, just use this quick method: right-click the photo you’ve found and choose Set as desktop background (or Set as desktop wallpaper) on the context menu that appears.

You can do this as often as you like, and the photo you've chosen will remain in use as your wallpaper until you choose something different. Indeed, if you like this way of changing your wallpaper, you can even use it to choose between Windows’ built-in wallpapers: just navigate to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper where you’ll find the various background pictures included with Windows, and you can right-click one of those to set it as your wallpaper.

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