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Unlock the hidden Lock Screen Slideshow (Picture Frame) feature in Windows 8.1 aka ‘Blue’

There are lots of secrets in the recently leaked Windows Blue build (the upcoming Windows 8.1 update). We already discovered new shell commands and shell locations, covered the new Modern File Manager and the new Bing-powered Search pane. Today, we are going to share few registry tweaks which will allow you to customize the brand new Lock Screen feature - called Picture Frame. Windows Blue allows you to turn your PC/tablet into a picture frame. This feature will swap a set of images from the folder you specify via the "PC Settings" applet.

Picture Frame Settings

When Picture Frame is enabled, it looks as follows:

Picture Frame

BetaArchive.com member Ultrawindows has discovered some hidden registry tweaks which will allow you to customize the "Picture Frame" feature behavior.

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All these hidden settings are located at the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lock Screen

If this key does not exist, then you should create it. See our Registry Editor fundamentals if you have any questions.

Here you can create the following parameters:

SlideshowDebug

This DWORD parameter can have either a value of 0 or 1. When it equals 1, some additional debug info will be overlaid on the "Picture Frame" background (see the screenshot below).

Picture Frame Debug Mode

SlideshowStartDelay

This DWORD value allows setting the delay before the Picture Frame slideshow starts. It must be in decimals and is expressed in milliseconds. If it equals zero, then the slideshow will be started without delay.

SlideshowTransitionTimerInterval

This DWORD value determines how much time the set of images will stay before they are swapped with another set of images. Like the parameter mentioned above, it must be in decimals and is expressed in milliseconds.

SlideshowTransitionTimerInvervalTolerance

It is not clear what this value does exactly, but if it's value is greater than 500, then the  slideshow stops and hangs.

See the Picture Frame feature in action:

via Betaarchive

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

11 thoughts on “Unlock the hidden Lock Screen Slideshow (Picture Frame) feature in Windows 8.1 aka ‘Blue’”

  1. Can you provide an exported Registry Key to click on to create the parameters and value to check to see if Lock Screen will enable?

    Mines isn’t enabled and I set the correct parameters, however it still has no effect.

  2. Is there a parameter that can be added to force ALL images in the slideshow to be full screen and never tile in the randomly chosen grid format?

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