When is a lock screen more than just a lock screen? When it's got a really cool picture on it! At least, that's the intention of the Spotlight feature on Windows 10's lock screen. It shows you some absolutely gorgeous photos, which creates a little extra anticipation when you unlock the computer—what cool photo will you see this time?

Now, if Windows isn't showing you any beautiful images on lock screen, we'll teach you how to enable the feature. Also, we'll show you three ways how you can find out.

How to Turn On Spotlight Images

If your computer isn’t showing any images on your lock screen, a third-party app or someone else changed your computer’s personalization settings. Fortunately, you can easily bring the lock screen images back.

Press Windows key + I to access Windows Settings. Then, go to Personalization > Lock screen. Extend the drop-down menu below Background and choose the Windows spotlight option.

Enable Spotlight images in Windows 10

If you don’t notice the change right away, there’s no need to worry. It will take your system a few returns to the lock screen until it stores enough images as cache data.

Now that you’ve enabled the spotlight images, let’s take a look at how you can find out where were the pictures taken.

1. Click “Like What You See?”

Unless you’ve paused Windows updates for a long time, you can easily check where the photo is from. When you're on the lock screen, you'll see Like what you see? in the top-right corner. Just hover your cursor over that, and it'll tell you where it was taken. Simple.

If you don't see this when you mouse over the text, then make sure to get the latest update. If you missed the chance to find out where the photos were taken when you were on the lock screen, you could use one of the next two methods.

2. Reverse Image Search the Images on Your Computer

You can also reverse image search the lock screen images to find their source. The lock screen images are stored in your system, but Microsoft hides them pretty well, so you will have to do some digging.

To show the hidden folder on your device, open File Explorer, then click the View tab. There, select Option to open the Folder Options menu. Click the View tab and select Show hidden files folders, and drives.

show-hidden-folders-1

Now, we need to find the folder containing the lock screen photos. For this, navigate to This PC > (C:) > Users > UserName > AppData > Local > Packages > Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy > LocalState > Assets. You should see files without any extensions.

Windows spotlight files

Now, not every file is a lock screen image. Your best bet to find the right images is to copy the biggest files. To arrange the files by size, go right-click within the File Explorer window and click Sort by > Size.

Once you arrange them by size, copy one of the files to another folder and add .JPG to its name so that you can open it with an image viewer. If you want to check out every image, you should copy all of them into a separate folder and use PowerToys to batch rename them.

If you haven’t installed PowerToys, you can batch rename the files using Command Prompt. Once you rename them, you’ll notice that only a few images have thumbnails.

You can delete the images without thumbnails as these are just app icons. If you can’t see any thumbnails, you should make Windows show thumbnails.

Then, you can go through the images until you find the ones that you like. The easiest way to find out more information about them is to do a reverse image search, either using Google Image or one of the best alternatives to Google's reverse image search.

3. Use the Spotlight Wallpapers App

Spotlight Wallpapers is a free Windows app you can use to find and download lock screen photos. If you want to find out where a Spotlight photo was taken, you will have to download and reverse-search it.

If you select Bing, click the Info button to find where the photo was taken. You can use the app to manage wallpapers both for Bing and Spotlight. You can set one of the photos as a lock screen or wallpaper using the button from the bottom-right corner.

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Find Where the Photos Were Taken Within a Few Clicks

Now you can find out where the lock screen photos were taken in Windows 10. As discussed, you can click "Like what you see?" on the lock screen, search for Spotlight files, or use a Microsoft app. Even if you're stuck in the office, you can start your working day with a beautiful view using the Spotlight Wallpapers app.