Today's Sunrise as 'Desktop Background'

I like taking random cloud photos from time to time, and then combining several of them into my own Windows Theme to be used on the monitor like the 'original equipment' ones provided by Microsoft. I made a new theme yesterday, with seven fresh photos, and today I added this one to it.


An old pal from our wild and crazy youth asked me the other day if there's a way to use all of the pictures in all of the Windows Themes individual sets all at once to get them to display as one long, uninterrupted changing set of desktop backgrounds. As far as I know, there's no built-in Windows program to do this, but don't let that stop you.

You can easily make a new Windows Theme of your own, and simply copy those images you like from wherever they are now in their original theme folders into your newly-created 'DesktopBackground' folder in your own big new 'supertheme' called perhaps 'Everything Wallpaper' or maybe something like 'My Supertheme' - whatever name grabs you.

Just go to C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Microsoft\Windows\Themes and in that Themes folder, create a new folder named for your own new theme. Inside that new folder, create another new folder and give it the name DesktopBackground or write that as the two separate words Desktop and Background, (it doesn't seem to matter) but this folder cannot be named anything else. Each named folder in Themes must contain one and only one other folder named Desktop Background. It is into this innermost folder Desktop Background that you must copy the images you want to use in your own new theme. You can have as many images as you like - as far as I know, there's no particular limit on their number.

Once your choices of images are all copied or pasted into that Desktop Background folder inside your newly-named theme folder in Themes, then all you have to do to get it actively going is click 'Organize', then choose 'Select All', to select all of your new images, and then on any of those do a right-click to bring up another menu, and on that choose 'Set as desktop background'. This will immediately cause your desktop background theme to switch to this new one you just made. You can now close all those windows, and clear off your desktop, now showing your new theme. On any clear area of that desktop, do a right-click, and then click on the bottom item which says 'Personalize'. That opens a new window for your themes Personalization. Your newest theme should show in there in the upper left corner of this Personalization window, and it will be named as 'Unsaved theme'. You should right-click on that and save it with its own new name like the one you chose for its theme folder. You can then treat it just the same as you would any original Windows Theme, and configure its settings just as you would if Windows Themes had come with it already installed. And you can make others if you don't like that one, and you can delete the ones you don't like or are tired of, or want to clear out to make room for more of your own. So relax, make yourself a hot cuppa, and have some fun. It's your Windows after all, so please enjoy it!