If you’re like most people, you probably have a bunch of photos and videos stored on your computer in different folders, all of which are scattered around the desktop. It can be a pain to go through and find the photo you wanted to use as your desktop background, or to find the video you wanted to watch when you’re bored. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to change the default wallpaper folder on Windows XP: just open the Control Panel, click on Appearance and Personalization, and then click on the Wallpaper tab. There, you’ll see a list of all the folders on your computer where photos and videos are stored. You can select any of these folders as your new wallpaper folder, and Windows XP will automatically start using all the photos and videos in that folder as your desktop background! ..

There’s a fairly simple registry hack you can do to make Windows look in a different folder, but if you want to get rid of Blue Lace 16 you’ll also have to delete it manually. (The standard warnings about registry editing apply here)

With a name like “Bliss” you would think I would be less tired of seeing this:

Change Wallpaper Folder

Open up regedit.exe using the start menu Run box, and then navigate down to the following key:

On the right-hand side you should see a value called WallPaperDir, which defines the folder Windows uses to populate the list. If the key does not exist, then you can create a new string value with the same name.

Double-click to change the value, and then paste in the full path to your My Pictures folder. (Note that you could specify any path here if you wanted to.)

The change should be immediate, the next time you open the Desktop panel… but you’ll notice a number of default images still in the list. Turns out that Windows also queries the Windows folder for images…

To get rid of those, browse to C:\Windows and then look for a set of horribly ugly Bitmap files:

You can delete these images to make them stop appearing in the wallpaper selection list, just be careful not to delete anything else in your Windows folder or you likely won’t be able to boot anymore.

Another annoyance solved…