Windows Spotlight Extractor

Windows 10 displays various background images on the lock screen, changing them once every a few restarts. These are called Spotlight images and are usually they beautiful high-quality pictures, so it’s only normal that you might want to save them locally and use them as desktop wallpapers as well.   However, their location is not immediately available but, with a little effort, you can find it, copy all the files to a separate folder and rename each every one of them to include a JPG extension, either manually, or via the command prompt. Or you can leave all this work in the hands of the Windows Spotlight Extractor. 

This particular application has an extremely small footprint and requires no installation, meaning it is ready to go once you download it. Without further ado, it takes a look into the Spotlight cache and it displays all the images that it finds in thumbnail mode, allowing you to preview them all within its main window. There is no way to take a closer look at the lock screen backgrounds, as no option to see them in full screen is available.

You can easily open the cache folder from within the application, without having to look for its location yourself. The names of all the files are, by default, hidden, but you can also configure Windows Spotlight Extractor to reveal them to you. As soon as you do so, you will notice that the names of files are different strings with no meaning, and no extension is displayed.

Saving the lock screen pictures on your computer is very easy. All you have to do is select the image in question, right-click on it and press the “Extract” button. You are then prompted to browse for the location where the image will be saved. Windows Spotlight Extractor saves lock screen backgrounds locally in JPG format, saving you time and effort.