How to Change Your Desktop Background

One of the easiest and most noticeable ways to customize your computer is by changing your desktop background (also known as the wallpaper). Your desktop is the space which shows up when there are no windows open and through which you can access most of your programs. It’s a great place to put up a favorite vacation picture or a family photo because it lets you make your computer more personalized.

This guide shows you how to easily change your desktop background, using either your own photo or a picture you found on the Internet.

Finding an image

The first step to changing your background is finding the picture that you’d like to use. If you have an image already stored on your computer, you should note which folder it is located in and skip ahead to the Setting your image as the desktop background section.

There are plenty of free wallpapers online. You can find a ton by searching on Google.  Here’s a short tutorial on how to download your own image from the web when you have found the perfect one:

1. You can use any site you’d like, but for this tutorial, let’s use this one. Click on the link to open the website.
2. Find an image that you’d like to use for your desktop background. We need to use a larger version of the thumbnail that is shown, so just click on the smaller picture for a larger one to appear.
3. Right-click anywhere on the large image and click Save image as…
   
4. Decide where you’ll save the image by using the following window. To make it easy to remember where you saved the file, it might be a good idea to save it under your username in the Pictures folder.
   

Setting your image as the desktop background

Now that we’ve selected an image to use as our background, we need to tell the computer that we want the desktop to display it.

1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and select Personalize.
   
2. Click on the Desktop Background button.
   
3. By default, the computer should show you images in your Pictures folder. If you saved your image in this folder, you should see the thumbnail in the list. If not, you’ll need to use the browse button to find your image.
4. Click on the thumbnail of the image you’d like to use and click OK. You should see your background change automatically.
5. We want to make sure the picture isn’t stretched- otherwise it won’t look very good on your desktop. Ideally, you want to use the Center option. You can find it as one of three settings under the How should the picture be positioned section on the same window. From left to right, the three options are: Fit to screen, Tile, and Center. You can play with these settings to find which one you like best. Simply click on the different buttons and watch your desktop’s background change in real-time.
   
6. Once you found the perfect setting and are satisfied, click the OK button and enjoy your fancy new background!