Do you have a nice desktop background, perhaps even a treasured photo you can’t seem to find on your hard drive? Even if you deleted the original image, there still a way to find the current desktop background image in Windows 10.
The operating system remembers the last few photos you used as a desktop background. In fact, you can switch between them in the Settings app. So not only you can find the desktop image on your hard drive, you can also set it back as your desktop background directly from Settings, with no need to go to its location on the hard drive.
How to find the current desktop background image in Windows 10
Assuming the image was one of your recent desktop backgrounds but you have a different one at the moment, open the Settings app and go to Personalization -> Background. There, look under the ‘Choose your picture’ section and click on the photo you want to find, to set it as the current background. No need to do this, if the image is already set as the desktop background.
To continue, open File Explorer and type (or paste) the following in the address bar then hit Enter on your keyboard:
%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles
There, you should have a copy of the current desktop background which you can copy to another location to create a backup.
If you don’t find your desktop background in this folder you can try typing the address below in Explorer:
%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\TranscodedWallpaper
As soon as you hit Enter you will be prompted to choose an app to view the image. You can use Windows Photo Viewer or the Photos app, both of them work.
While this trick lets you find the current desktop background image in Windows 10, if the image is no longer available in the Background section of the Settings app, you won’t be able to recover it.
