Windows Spotlight is a new Windows 10 feature which displays random images on your lock screen.
Now every now and then the picture happens to be a particularly nice one, and I'd like to know more about it. (What does it show? Where was it taken?)
I was able to (kind of) solve this problem with the following steps:
Go to the lock screen settings. A preview of the current lock screen image is shown there.
Take a screenshot of the preview and upload it to Google Reverse Image Search.
Is there an easier way?
46 Answers
To save the Spotlight images stored on your computer, see this procedure in this article:
How to save Windows Spotlight lockscreen images so you can use them as wallpapers.
To download almost all Spotlight images from Microsoft servers in a few minutes in high-resolution, see theSpotBright app.
Once you have the images, you can scan them for metadata that may contain information about where they came from.
There are various mechanisms for embedding metadata in images : IPTC, EXIF, XMP. This metadata is the only textual data contained inside the image.
EXIF is stored in the image by the camera and may contain information such as the GPS coordinates (if the camera has GPS, which most smartphones do). IPTC and XMP are added manually, as is normally done by professional photographers.
The best tool I have found for displaying that information is the freePicture Information Extractor. Try this tool on one of these downloaded images to see if Microsoft has kept some of that data or scrubbed it out.
If you have found such a useful tag(s), there exist image renamers that can use metadata tags to batch-rename the images.
6Apparently, the "what does it show" issue has been fixed (silently). In the current version (Windows 10 14393.105) hovering over the "Like what you see?" tag shows the name of the location:
Information found here from DSKslund, it solved my problem:Microsoft forum
It's a user account security issue.
Go to or in the general settings search for "User Accounts" Select "Manage User Accounts" At the top, select the "Advanced" tab.
In the bottom section: "Secure Sign-in": now DE-select "Require users to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete"
That's it. Lock your computer (windows + L) and you should magically see all the info everyone else has. If that doesn't work like I said and you're worried about security, simply recheck the box and you're no worse for wear.
You will also find that when your computer is locked, now you can just press any key to bring up the login. This does NOT negate having to log in - just not having to press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
3Since I was encountering similar frustrations, I wrote a Python script to perform this lookup not long ago. Hope it helps.
GitHub: Windows 10 Lock Screen Image Lookup
2The real issue looks likely to be a bug rather than a setting. I'd been wondering about this since upgrading a load of PCs to W10 Pro just before the end of the free upgrade offer.
Some, but very few, had extended information about the images (but not all images, some just had links to XBox or Windows Store content).
My own machine didn't have the info but my personal Surface with W10 Pro installed did. Settings were all exactly the same.
Today I accessed Windows>Settings>Lock Screen, changed back to Picture with Cortana features enabled, changed to Slideshow with custom folder, then back to Spotlight and I now have the info on the images. Presumably a bug rather than a feature that has driven a lot of people nuts.
Hope this works for you if you try it.
1I found this article which gives a handy VBScript to find the current image, copy it to your Pictures folder, and open it in your favorite image viewer
From there, it is easy to open in Google Image search by copy and pasting the image to the upload form located at
