Windows 7 default images

For pre-release wallpapers and pictures, see Windows 7 Beta.

Windows 7 is an operating system released by Microsoft in 2009. It is the successor of Windows Vista. Unlike Vista which was widely criticized for its performance, 7 was more positively received and widely adopted. It was followed by Windows 8 in 2012.

Wallpapers[]

For Windows 7’s wallpapers, Microsoft licensed rights-managed images from Getty Images and Corbis, as with previous versions. Images were also licensed from other sources, such as SIME/4Corners Images, Photolibrary, and individual photographers’ PhotoShelters. While Windows 7 continues the tradition of using photography, two new themes consisting of illustrations were added, to give Windows 7 «a little bit of personality» according to Steven Sinofsky. The illustrators were found through the agency 72 and Sunny.^[1] They also worked with photographer Will Austin, who directly assisted Microsoft with selecting six wallpapers from his stock collection, as it wanted to incorporate photos from Seattle in Windows 7’s themes, the city where its headquarters are located in.^[2][3] Austin described Windows 7’s wallpapers as «a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to the user experience».

While Windows Vista included a small set of 16:10 widescreen wallpapers, this is the first Windows version where all of the wallpapers are 1920×1200, as widescreen displays were more widespread by 2009. It is also the first version where the wallpapers are included as part of themes; while Vista’s wallpapers were split into categories, 7 sorts the wallpapers by themes instead, where selecting the theme will have the corresponding set of wallpapers being used as a slideshow.

The default wallpaper is Harmony, created by Chuck Anderson and Erik Attkisson. Whereas Windows XP and Vista Starter editions have unique wallpaper sets, Windows 7 only has one wallpaper for its Starter edition, which is an edited version of the default wallpaper seen in other editions. Windows 7 Home Basic features the same wallpaper set as all higher editions but only has Windows and Landscapes categories.

Regional[]

Windows 7 features regional themes for 20 countries, similar to Starter Edition featuring 3-6 wallpapers for each country. The team behind these themes licensed images from a wide range of stock photo agencies, including Getty Images, Corbis, SIME/4Corners Images, Masterfile, age fotostock, and JupiterImages (which was acquired by Getty during Windows 7’s development). Jennifer Shepherd, who produced the regional themes, also hosted a worldwide photo contest where Microsoft employees worldwide were able to submit photos that represent their country. Employees of each country voted on the best wallpapers for their theme, including both stock photos and winning images from the contest.^[4] These themes aren’t implemented as part of a language pack, but rather manually added to the OS image (e.g. a user performed a clean installation with the image in the English language and if they install the Korean language pack later, they won’t get the regional themes as if they performed a clean installation from the Korean language’s image), in details:

The existence of the alleged preinstalled India theme has been mentioned in a post on the official Windows Experience Blog in 2010. However, this isn’t included in any vanilla Windows 7 images released by Microsoft to obtain separately, but is preinstalled by certain OEMs (Original equipment manufacturers), such as Acer with Gateway NV57H58u (2011).^[5]

As well as built-in themes for each of the 20 countries, the team also produced downloadable themes of the same countries that were available from Microsoft’s site after Windows 7 was released. The team produced a total of 40 themes, two for each country, totaling 240 regional wallpapers. 20 of these are included in Windows 7, while the other 20 were available for download as soon as Windows 7 was released. From Windows 7 onwards, themes have the wallpapers set as a slideshow, while XP-era themes had one default wallpaper often with a few extra options.

Right now this page only lists the built-in ones, but it is possible that the downloadable ones will be documented on a separate page in the future.

To get a regional theme to display in the Personalization Control Panel:

1. Close any opening Personalization Control Panel, if any.
2. From Control Panel:
   • If you’re viewing as Category: Navigate to Clock, Language, and Region → Region and Language.
   • If you’re viewing as Large/small icons: Click Region and Language.
3. Go to the Location tab, choose any region listed below (depending on the language version, for example: the English version came with regional themes for Australia, Canada, South Africa, United Kingdom, and United States), and click Apply.
4. Open the Personalization Control Panel and check if the regional theme shows up in the «Aero Themes» section.

Sample pictures[]

Windows 7 has eight sample pictures. Half of them are royalty free Corbis images; the other half were taken by Microsoft employees. Like with Windows Vista’s sample pictures, they are all at a resolution of 1024×768.

User account pictures[]

Most of Windows 7’s user account pictures come from Getty Images and use a mixture of royalty free and rights-managed licenses, with a few coming from Corbis, hired artists that worked on 7’s wallpapers, and one Microsoft employee. As with Vista’s, they are at 128×128.

Logon backgrounds[]

The logon background is similar to the default desktop wallpaper, being designed by Chuck Anderson and Erik Attkisson too. The image itself is pretty minimalistic — it depicts a sky blue background with several stripes and grass blades on it, and a bird near the leaves of one of the plants. This background is also used for the post-install OOBE. Like with Vista’s logon background, it is included in a range of resolutions ranging from 1024×768 to 1920×1200.

The Embedded versions feature a completely different logon background, consisting of a dark blue radial gradient, and a line of rounded squares placed in line across the background. It is very similar to the branding wallpapers featured in the Embedded 2009 versions of Windows XP, albeit with duller shades of blue and more opaque squares. Like in regular Windows 7 editions, this background is also used for post-install OOBE and is included in various resolutions.

Setup backgrounds[]

The setup background is in BMP format and 1024×768, like with Vista. It can be seen during installation and in the recovery boot menu. It can be found in various places on the Windows 7 DVD as background_cli. (i.e. in the /sources/ folder). It looks very similar to the logon background, although featuring a darker blue background color, white clouds added on top, and some lines near the center shortened or made more transparent.

The Embedded versions also feature a different setup background. It is very similar to the logon background, although the line of squares is slightly further down (due to resolution) and the colors are in a slightly different order. It can be found on the Windows 7 DVD as background_emb.

Trivia[]

• Including all of the built-in regional wallpapers, Windows 7 has a total of 151 wallpapers, the highest number of wallpapers built into a version of Windows. If the downloadable regional ones that were made available upon 7’s release are also included, the count goes up to 271.

References[]

When you login to your Windows 7 computer (assuming you haven’t used something like this tutorial to turn on automatic login), you’ll generally see a login window with a background looking something like this.

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It’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with it. But sometimes a change is good so in this article we’ll show you how to change the background image behind the login screen to anything you want.

The first step is to open up the Start Menu by clicking the orb in the lower left corner of the screen.

Now, in the Start Menu search box, type regedit, to open up the Registry Editor.

When the Registry Editor appears in the Start Menu, click the Enter key to launch it. You should see a window like this.

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Now, right-click on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder, and choose the Find option.

The search window will appear so perform a search for OEMBackground.

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It will eventually be found under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background (you could navigate there directly, but the search function is probably quicker than typing all that into the path bar.

Note: it’s possible that OEMBackground doesn’t exist on your system; if this is the case, adding a new DWORD value with the name of OEMBackground will fix things.

Once you can see the OEMBackground entry, double click to reveal its properties, and change the value from 0 (the default) to 1 (which will allow us – or the computer’s OEM as intended – to change the login screen background).

Once this is finished you can close the Registry Editor and open up Windows Explorer. We want to go to %windir%\system32\oobe, so enter that into the path bar.

You’ll now need to create an info folder (all lowercase), and then a new folder, named backgrounds (also lowercase), inside the info folder. Depending on your computer’s OEM, you may find these folders already exist and may already have images in them, placed there by Dell or HP or IBM, etc.

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Now simply select a favorite wallpaper. It should be in JPG format and less than 245 KB in size (and ideally the exact dimensions of your display to avoid stretching). Name this image backgroundDefault.jpg and place it in the backgrounds folder.

You can now restart, lock your screen or logout to see your new login screen.

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Congratulations! This isn’t the simplest process, and isn’t as simple as using a program like Windows 7 Logon Background Changer, but if you want to get into the particulars regarding what programs like that are doing, this is a good way to go, if a bit more complex.