Save your favorite backgrounds to a local drive
Before getting to the actual tutorial, it’s important to describe how Windows Spotlight works. Introduced in Windows 10, this particular OS functionality automatically sets a new lock screen wallpaper every day if a connection to Internet exists.
To do this, Windows Spotlight connects to Bing, Microsoft’s search platform, and downloads the Bing homepage of the day background to use it on your lock screen. Only high-quality photos are being used, and they come with helpful information like location where it was taken and other trivia details that many of us enjoy reading.
Since these photos are downloaded to be used on your system, they must be stored somewhere, right? This is exactly how Windows Spotlight works. The better thing for us is that after replacing wallpapers, the old ones aren’t deleted, so you can save them manually and create your own collection of wallpapers to use them at a later time.
Doing this is not at all difficult, though it involves several important steps, including working with Command Prompt. An administrator account is needed.
This command will add the JPG extension at the end of each file in the Wallpapers folder. The process could take a while depending on the number of files in the folder, but it typically needs just a few seconds to come to an end.
After the cleaning comes to an end, you should have a folder full of wallpapers downloaded by Windows Spotlight. If you wish, you can configure this folder to be the default wallpaper source for your lock screen, though this means that no addition pics would be downloaded by Windows Spotlight.
