- Let's see how to change the
background image on your desktop.
Sometimes known as the wallpaper.
In this case you can see I just have this flat blue color.
If you have not customized this yet,
you might be looking at one of the bundled pictures
that comes with Windows 11.
To change this you'll need to go to settings.
So I'll go to the start menu to settings.
On the left I'll go to the personalization category.
Then I want to go to background.
And I also want to resize this window so I can see
the background as we make changes.
And I want to start in this menu
where you can choose what type of background you use.
You could choose solid color,
and then you can choose the color that you want.
And you'll see that change here.
But you might want a picture.
So we can go back to this menu and switch to picture.
And there are several pictures that come with Windows 11.
And all of these are going to look
very nice as a background,
so you could choose one of those.
But you might prefer to use one of your own pictures.
To do that you can click where it says browse photos,
and then you can navigate to the folder
where you've got your pictures.
This takes me to my pictures folder,
where I've got this Italy sub folder.
Then I'll go into this Florence folder,
and I've got some pictures here,
and I want to start with one
that I think will not work well as a background image.
This picture here is really tall and narrow.
It's not the same shape as my screen.
So let's see what happens if I pick this one.
I'll select it,
then I'll click choose.
And now we can see that picture and it really doesn't look
great because the top and bottom are being cut off.
But back here in settings,
we can go to this menu,
and currently we're set to fill.
That means that the picture that you choose
will fill the screen even if the photo is cut off.
Now you could try stretch,
which will display the entire picture,
but it stretches it to fill the screen.
If the picture is almost the right shape
for your screen this can help,
but in this case the proportions are just wrong.
It still looks bad.
But I think if we switch over to the fit option,
this actually is a fairly okay option.
In this case we can see the entire picture,
but it doesn't fill the screen.
The rest of the desktop is just filled with whatever
background color you have selected.
So I could go back here in settings
and I could choose a different background
that would fit the picture a little bit better,
but maybe it's just better to choose a photo
that does work well.
So I'm going to go back to the browse photos button,
and I'm going to choose this picture.
It's not quite the same shape as my screen,
but it's a lot closer.
I'll select that,
then choose picture.
And this is looking okay so far,
but I'm going to reset this back to the fill setting.
And while it's not perfect,
I think this works a lot better for a background picture.
Of course it's the right shape for the screen,
but also there are really no distractions in the picture.
I think that pictures with people,
or text in them don't really work so well.
Especially if you have a bunch of files on your desktop,
it just makes things harder to see.
Okay let's go back into settings.
And once you've set your desktop background,
there are some other details you might want to look at.
I'm going to back up to that personalization category.
And this time I want to go over to colors.
Because I want to take a look at our accent color.
This is a highlight color
that will show up in various places in Windows.
You can see that little blue line here.
That's the accent color.
So when you select items here,
you can see which one is selected and it has that color.
It's easier to see if we go to the quick settings panel
where you can see all of the buttons
and sliders here have that accent color.
Now you could choose something different.
Maybe I'll choose this red color.
And then you can see those buttons change.
Or what you might want to do is change this
to the automatic setting.
And then the computer will pick a color
that matches your background image.
So if I look at that,
that really matches my background pretty well.
So that might be a good option.
At this point,
you might want to browse through some of the other controls
you have here in the personalization settings.
You may find something useful here.
But we've really addressed the most important thing.
Changing your background image.
Since you spend a lot of time
looking at your computer screen,
that background image can be very important.