Change Default Wallpaper Folder to My Pictures on Windows XP
Have you ever wondered why Windows XP had such terribly ugly wallpapers to choose from? On top of that, there's no way to easily change the list of backgrounds to a folder you might actually use… like your My Pictures folder.
There's a fairly simple registry hack you can do to make Windows look in a different folder, but if you want to get rid of Blue Lace 16 you'll also have to delete it manually. (The standard warnings about registry editing apply here)
With a name like "Bliss" you would think I would be less tired of seeing this:
Change Wallpaper Folder
Open up regedit.exe using the start menu Run box, and then navigate down to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
On the right-hand side you should see a value called WallPaperDir, which defines the folder Windows uses to populate the list. If the key does not exist, then you can create a new string value with the same name.
Double-click to change the value, and then paste in the full path to your My Pictures folder. (Note that you could specify any path here if you wanted to.)
The change should be immediate, the next time you open the Desktop panel… but you'll notice a number of default images still in the list. Turns out that Windows also queries the Windows folder for images…
To get rid of those, browse to C:\Windows and then look for a set of horribly ugly Bitmap files:
You can delete these images to make them stop appearing in the wallpaper selection list, just be careful not to delete anything else in your Windows folder or you likely won't be able to boot anymore.
Another annoyance solved…
Greetings from Tenn. I just wanted to say how much I enjoy and learn from your E-mails. They are one of the few I make sure to read each time. The way you present the information is simple enough that I can understand and follow along. Please keep up your hard work.
Thank You
Dwane
Nice. Can this hack be used on any other folders than My Pictures?
If I'm not mistaken, I think the Microsoft PowerToy "TweakUI XP" does this too. It's in the item called "Login" which allows you to change what's on the .DEFAULT profile. I could be wrong, but I have used that to change the default screensaver, so I am guessing it works for wallpaper too.
@Syahid
Yes, you can use any filesystem path in place of that folder.
@Dwane:
Thanks for the compliments!
@Dave:
You very well could be right. I don't have TweakUI installed on my test machine, so I'll have to look into it.
My bad. TweakUI lets you change the default settings for new accounts (like wallpaper). It doesn't change the wallpaper folder. Perhaps this could be another article on H2G.
One thing to note here is that the default value for that key is %WINDIR%\Web\Wallpaper.
That folder stores all the nice JPEG format wallpapers available in Windows XP and Vista.
If you change it those wallpapers will no longer appear in the list.
One correction to my post, the default path is actually %SystemRoot%\Web\Wallpaper.
Also I recall seeing Windows XP loading images from My Pictures without a registry change.
Not sure why it doesn't seem to be doing it now.
Desktop properties - Any way to make the default position STRETCH?
might not
%HOMEPATH%\My Documents\My Pictures
be better than a hard coded path??
If someone is the only user of computer of the computer then hard coding the path won't make that much of a difference.
If the computer is used by multiple users then using path that isn't hard coded will make it so each user's "My Pictures" contents will displayed instead of just the "My Pictures" of the person who did the tweak. Assuming of course the all those users kept their "My Pictures" in the default location otherwise it wouldn't work.
From a steps perspective if this article was updated with something like "If you use the default My Pictures folder location you can use the following value" then people with a default My Pictures folder location can just copy the value from the article instead of from an explorer window. Thus saving them a few extra seconds when doing the tweak.
I just decided to test what I remembered by setting up a virtual machine and found that at least on a new install the wallpaper list does display pictures in the "My Pictures" without any tweaks.
See screen shot at http://imagegrotto.com/view-Di.....ak7204.jpg
I'm not sure what all can disable that but I know at least redirecting "My Pictures" to a network drive does.
This article should be updated to say it's only needed if the builtin ability to list images from "My Pictures" disappeared somehow to use this tweak.
@jd2066
That's interesting… it didn't work on my test VM. I'll do some testing of my own and update the article.
Thx for this nice tip
@jd2066 and anyone
Btw, I was reading the user comments, and in my opinion, this tip is very useful, you just need to know how to use it in each personal way, so, jd2066 I think you took the title "Change Default Wallpaper Folder to My Pictures on Windows XP" to much at heart, altho it's nice to know that windows takes the "my pics" folder as "default", I really don't think this article needs an update just because windows automatically puts the images from the "my pics" folder… let's say the title was "Change Default Wallpaper Folder to Whatever Folder you like the most on Windows XP"… for example, what if you like to keep your images in a complete diferent partition and organized folder, I for sure wouldn't copy or move the images to the "My pics" folder just because Windows _wants_ me to… I rather put Windows working the way I want and like it
Hi Guys,
was just looking at all these helpful tips, now how about the reverse process? What if by default my Windows XP is including the pictures in the My Pictures folder and I don't want it to? How do I remove that?
Thanks
@Thomas: From what I can tell you can't. From my tests the only time Windows XP doesn't display pictures from the "My Pictures" folder is when the "My Pictures" folder is redirected to a network location.
Wow that's really helpful. I have a folder in My Pictures for my desktop wallpaper and I was wondering how I could just automatically have those show up in the desktop preferences without having to manually browse for them.
welldone, thanks.