CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspowershellpowershell-2.0
Aidan Casey
Aidan Casey

Reputation: 13

Changing ALL user's wallpaper

Recently I've come across a situation where we need to set the default wallpaper as well as any existing user's wallpaper with PowerShell.

We can set the default wallpaper by replacing the file C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows\img0.jpg but I've yet to find a suitable solution for replacing any existing wallpapers.

Some things I've thought about / tried:

Am I completely missing something here? Does anyone have a suggestion for how we could set this up?

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 7037

Answers (1)

Aidan Casey
Aidan Casey

Reputation: 13

After some playing around, here's what I came up with. I'm no PowerShell guru so feel free to throw out some better solutions.

# Get each folder under "Users"
$drive = (Get-Location).Drive.Root
$users = Get-ChildItem "$($drive)Users"

# For each user, load and edit their registry
foreach ( $user in $users ) {

    # If this isn't us, load their hive and set the directory
    # If this is us, use HKEY_CURRENT_USER
    if ( $user.Name -ne $env:username ) {
        reg.exe LOAD HKU\Temp "$($drive)Users\$($user.Name)\NTUSER.DAT"
        $dir = "Registry::HKEY_USERS\Temp\Control Panel\Desktop"
    } else {
        $dir = "Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop"
    }

    # We don't care about users that don't have this directory
    if ( (Test-Path $dir) ) {

        # Set the image
        Set-ItemProperty -Path $dir -Name "Wallpaper" -value "$($drive)Users\Public\Pictures\Sample Pictures\Tulips.jpg"

        # Set the style to stretch
        Set-ItemProperty -Path $dir -Name "WallpaperStyle" -value 2

    }

    # Unload user's hive
    if ( $user.Name -ne $env:username ) {
        [gc]::Collect()
        reg.exe UNLOAD HKU\Temp
    }
}

I'd like to thank TheMadTechnician for the GPO suggestion. Under normal circumstances, I'd definitely agree!

Upvotes: 1

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