If you changed your Windows 10 desktop background several times, the images you used will be shown in the Choose your picture in Settings. If you want to delete previous wallpapers and clear the used desktop background history, Windows 10 provides no option for this task! In this article, we will see how to remove previously used desktop background images history in Windows 10.

Windows 10 shows the last five wallpapers under "Choose your picture". To see it, open Settings and go to Personalization -> Background.  Unfortunately, there is no way to remove the images quickly from the history. The only way you can do it is to edit the Registry manually. Here is how it can be done.

To clear wallpaper history in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Close Settings if you have it running.
2. Open the Registry Editor app.
3. Go to the following Registry key.

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers

   See how to go to a Registry key with one click.

4. On the right, see the string values BackgroundHistoryPath0 - BackgroundHistoryPath4. They store the paths to your recently used wallpapers. Delete the desired values and you are done!

To remove the history completely, you can use the following Registry tweak:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers]
"BackgroundHistoryPath0"=-
"BackgroundHistoryPath1"=-
"BackgroundHistoryPath2"=-
"BackgroundHistoryPath3"=-
"BackgroundHistoryPath4"=-

You can copy and paste the tweak contents above to a new Notepad document. Then, press Ctrl + S or execute the File - Save item in the Notepad menu. This will open the Save dialog.

There, type or copy-paste the following name "ClearWallpaperHistory.reg" including quotes. Double quotes are important to ensure that the file will get the "*.reg" extension and not *.reg.txt. You can save the file to any desired location, for example, you can put it in your Desktop folder.

Double-click on the file you saved to clear the desktop background history instantly.

To save your time, you can download the ready-to-use Registry file from here:

Download Registry File

That's it.

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