Quick Vista Tips: How To Change The Desktop Wallpaper

I wanted to change back to the default Windows desktop wallpaper, this is a pretty awesome picture I found at Photos8.com, but it's not the one I'm going to keep using.

The first thing to do is to click on the "Start" button on the bottom toolbar.

Click on "Control Panel":

This is where it became confusing, I had mine set for "Classic View" and still had to look the list over a few times before I realized that I was looking for "Appearance & Themes" or "Display" which is what I'd be looking for in XP or Win 98. I should have been looking for "Personalization" instead.

I forget why I was set for "Classic View", but it is easier to do this in the standard setting:

Once you get into the Desktop Background area, things get much easier. My background had been set while using Firefox, so it looked like this:

The drop down menu should show the available places to find backgrounds like and pictures in your "Picture" or "Public Pictures" folders:

Solid Colors:

Sample pictures:

And the actual Wallpaper files. This is an Hewlett-Packard, so there is a set in here from them besides those that came with the Operating System:

Scrolling down to the bottom, I find the widescreen wallpapers:

Here's the one that I selected:

I'll get an example back at Photos8.com because it's loaded with great looking pictures, and they are all in the Public Domain.

I often get wallpapers with shots of the outdoors, mainly those that include the sky and this picture entitled "Moon Light" caught my eye:

With Internet Explorer and Firefox, it's easy enough to just right click on the full-sized picture you want to use and set it as the background right from the browser:

With Safari and Chrome you need to save the file to your computer first:

I made a new folder within my "Pictures" folder:

Then right clicked it and set it as the desktop picture from within the folder:

Here's what my desktop looked like when I was done:

I was surprised to see that none of the backgrounds I've used in the past were saved on my computer. I may have used the Internet Explorer method, so they may only be considered temporary internet files, they may have been erased during a file clean up or when I upgraded to the latest version. .

If you plan on re-using the pictures later, you may need to save them before setting them as your background wallpaper.

An interesting thing I noticed is that when setting the picture with Firefox or from within Vista, I was given the choice of three different positions for the image. This is how it looks in Firefox:

With an picture this size, there's really not much of a difference, but if I reduce the size and try it again, I can make it look like this using the Tile setting:

Windows Vista & Vista Logo: Trademarks of Microsoft

Wave Splash over Sunset &
Moon Light Photos courtesy Photos8.com

Original content:


Quick Vista Tips:
How To Change The Desktop Wallpaper
by CleanerLife
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.