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Decorating Windows Explorer

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This is a tip that someone recently showed me that I really liked.  It allows you to display in Windows Vista (I haven’t tried it on any other Windows OS) a unique background image in Windows Explorer for each drive (internal or external) that you have in your computer.  This is particularly useful if you have external USB drives as it lets you assign a different background image to each one, making them easily identifiable.

It is simple to setup, and only takes a few minutes:

  1. Create a file called “desktop.ini” in the root of the drive that you wish to have the custom background image.

  2. Open the file in notepad (or your favourite text editor), and insert the following text:

    [ExtShellFolderViews]

    {BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}={BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}

    [{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}]

    Attributes=1

    IconArea_Image=U:\MYBACKGROUNDFILE.gif

(where u:\mybackgroundfile.gif is the name of the image file that you want to display)

Take care with the type of image that you choose, anything too garish will make Windows Explorer pretty ugly to use.  The best type of image is one that is almost transparent or very faded, that way the background won’t ‘commandeer’ the display, it will just add to the visual effect of Windows Explorer.

BTW, you need to specify the path to the image file, unless the file is in the same folder as the desktop.ini file.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    Hi, All I can say is wow. That is a lot of information.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2009
    That don't work for me. I did exactly what you say but no background image in my explorer view...