Tip o’ the Week 394 – Change your lock screen

As any fule kno, good corporate types should lock their PC every time they walk away from the machine. The Dynamic Lock function in Windows might help, and further tips were covered back in ToW #372. The simplest way to lock your machine when you get up and go to walk away, is to hit WindowsKey+L.

When you return to the computer, assuming you’re not showing a screen saver or the screen hasn’t gone completely blank due to power settings switching it off, you’ll likely have some kind of lock screen be shown – customisable under Settings -> Personalisation -> Lock Screen (or just press Start and type lock to jump straight into the lock screen settings).

The default Windows spotlight option shows some lovely images downloaded from Bing – if you like seeing those, then by all means leave it as it is, and if you want to grab those image files for other purposes (setting your desktop image, maybe), there’s a handy tutorial here.

If you have your own photo or folder(s) of photos you’d like to show instead, then just choose the appropriate option under the background drop-down, and point Windows to where your files are.

You need to ensure your photos fit on the screen properly, though, as they might be a different size or orientation, and you won’t want to cut key features of your picture out. Fortunately, there’s a quick & simple way of doing so using the Photos app.

Start by copying all the images you’d like to use for your lockscreen into a new folder (to make it easy to point the at them if you’d like a slideshow), and then open each one in Photos.

Click or tap on Edit, and select the Crop and rotate option. You can then quickly adjust the aspect ratio of your photo, and if the source image is portrait format (whereas your screen will almost certainly be 16:9 widescreen landscape), you could first set the image to be Widescreen then tweak “Make landscape”.

These options will show you a window over your photo, you then drag the picture around underneath so as to line up the features you want and when you’re happy with the layout, hit Done. After you’ve played around with other filters or enhancements, just save the picture, and you’ll be dropped back into the main Photo app to view your results.

If you’re just doing one picture, click or tap Set as >, and you can quickly make the pic your lock screen or background.