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When it comes to using your personal computer, many people like to customize theirs to give it a personal touch. If you are a Windows user, there are many things you can change such as the system colors, themes, and start menu features. One thing most people change right away is the Windows desktop background image. When doing so, you can choose from the built in Windows background images or add your own from your personal photos.
One thing you may come across is that when you use your own pictures for your background, they will replace the default Windows images and when you go back to the personalization options, they will be replaced by your personal photos. In this article, we will be showing you how to remove or delete your Windows desktop background image history.
As you can see in the image below, there are several personal photos that were added as desktop background images. As you add more of your own pictures, they will fill up the list and take over the default Windows images. You will also find that you cannot remove these pictures from the Personalization section in the Windows settings app.
To remove or delete your Windows desktop image history, we will be performing a simple registry edit. To begin, simply type in regedit in the Windows taskbar search box. You will need to be a local administrator on the computer or have access to the name and password of one to open the Windows Registry Editor.
Once you have the Registry Editor open, navigate to the following key. You can also copy and paste the text below into the address bar.
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers
Once you are in the Wallpaper section, you should see your desktop background history with the image name and folder location path. For our example, we want to keep the guitars image but delete the beach, trail and Corvette images. To do so, we will select the ones we want to delete as shown in the image below.
Once we have the entries we want to delete selected, we will then press the delete key on our keyboard. You can also right click on them and choose Delete. You will then need to click the Yes button to confirm that you want to remove the entries from the registry.
You will then need to close and reopen the Windows Personalization settings, and you should see that your old images have been removed. Depending on how many you removed, you should also see the default Windows background images and can now use them if desired.
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