Rotating pictures from my portfolio on the Windows 7 Logon screen

In the last 3 posts I outlined my Get-IndexedItem function for accessing windows Search. The more stuff I have on my computers the harder it is to find a way of classifying it so it fits into hierarchical folders : the internet would be unusable without search, and above a certain number of items local stuff is too.  Once I got search I start leaving most mail in my Inbox and outlook uses search to find what I want; I have one “book” in Onenote with a handful of sections and if I can’t remember where I put something, search comes to the rescue. I take the time to tag photos so that I don’t have to worry too much about finding a folder structure to put them in. So I’ll tag geographically  (I only have a few pictures from India – one three week trip, so India gets one tag but UK pictures get divided by County , and in counties with many pictures I put something like Berkshire/Reading. Various tools will make a hierarchy with Berkshire then Newbury, Reading etc) People get tagged by name – Friends and Family being a prefix to group those and so on. I use Windows’ star ratings to tag pictures I like – whether I took them or not – and Windows “use top rated pictures” for the Desktop background picks those up. I also have a tag of “Portfolio”

Ages ago I wrote about Customizing the Windows 7 logon screen. So I had the idea “Why not find pictures with the Portfolio tag, and make them logon backgrounds.”  Another old post covers PowerShell tools for manipulating images so I could write a script to do it, and use Windows scheduled tasks to run that script each time I unlocked the computer so that the next time I went to the logon screen I would have a different picture. That was the genesis of Get-IndexedItem. And I’ve added it, together with the New-LogonBackground to the image module download on the Technet Script Center

If you read that old post you’ll see one of the things we depend on is setting a registry key so the function checks that registry key is set and writes a warning if it isn’t:

if ( (Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
      ).oembackground -ne 1) {
        Write-Warning "Registry Key OEMBackground under
          HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background needs to be set to 1"
        Write-Warning "Run AS ADMINISTRATOR with -SetRegistry to set the key and try again."
}

So if the registry value isn’t set to 1, the function prints a warning which tells the user to run with –SetRegistry. After testing this multiple times – I found changing windows theme resets the value – and forgetting to run PowerShell with elevated permissions, I put in a try / catch to pick this up and say “Run Elevated”. Just as a side note here I always find when I write try/catch it doesn’t work and it takes me a moment to remember catch works on terminating errors and the command you want to catch must usually needs –ErrorAction stop

if ($SetRegistry ) {
  try{ Set-ItemProperty -Name oembackground -Value 1 -ErrorAction Stop `
               -PATH "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background" 
   }
  catch [System.Security.SecurityException]{
     Write-Warning "Permission Denied - you need to run as administrator"
  }
   return
}

The function also tests that it can write to the directory where the images are stored, since this doesn’t normally have user access: if it can’t write a file, it tells the user to set the permissions. Instead of using try/catch here I use $? to see if the previous command was successful
Set-content -ErrorAction "Silentlycontinue" -Path "$env:windir\System32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds\testFile.txt" `
              -Value "This file was created to test for write access. It is safe to remove"
if (-not $?) {write-warning "Can't create files in $env:windir\System32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds please set permissions and try again"
              return
}
else         {Remove-Item -Path "$env:windir\System32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds\testFile.txt"}


The next step is to find the size of the monitor. Fortunately, there is a WMI object for that, but not all monitor sizes are supported as bitmap sizes so the function takes –Width and –Height parameters. If these aren’t specified it gets the value from WMI and allows for a couple of special cases – my testing has not been exhaustive, so other resolutions may need special handling. The Width and height determine the filename for the bitmap, and later the function check the aspect ratio – so it doesn’t try to crop a portrait image to fit landscape monitor.

if (-not($width -and $height)) {
    $mymonitor = Get-WmiObject Win32_DesktopMonitor -Filter "availability = '3'" | select -First 1
    $width, $height = $mymonitor.ScreenWidth, $mymonitor.ScreenHeight
    if ($width -eq 1366) {$width = 1360}
    if (($width -eq 1920) -and ($height -eq 1080)) {$width,$height = 1360,768}
}
if (@("768x1280" ,"900x1440" ,"960x1280" ,"1024x1280" ,"1280x1024" ,"1024x768" , "1280x960" ,"1600x1200",
      "1440x900" ,"1920x1200" ,"1280x768" ,"1360x768") -notcontains "$($width)x$($height)" ) {
    write-warning "Screen resolution is not one of the defaults. You may need to specify width and height"
}
$MonitorAspect = $Width / $height
$SaveName = "$env:windir\System32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds\Background$($width)x$height.jpg"


The next step is to get the image – Get-Image is part of the PowerShell tools for manipulating images .

$myimage = Get-IndexedItem -path $path -recurse -Filter "Kind=Picture","keywords='$keyword'",
                            "store=File","width >= $width ","height >= $height " |
                      where-object {($_.width -gt $_.height) -eq ($width -gt $height)} |
                             get-random | get-image

Get-Indexed item looks for files in folder specified by –Path parameter – which defaults to [system.environment]::GetFolderPath( [system.environment+specialFolder]::MyPicture – the approved way to find the "my pictures" folder -recurse tells it to look in sub-folders and it looks for a file with keywords which match the –Keyword Parameter (which defaults to “Portfolio”). It filters out pictures which are smaller than the screen and then where-object filters the list down to those with have the right aspect ratio. Finally one image is selected at random and piped into Get-Image.

If this is successful , the function logs what it is doing to the event log. I set up a new log source “PSLogonBackground” in the application log by running PowerShell as administrator and using the command
New-EventLog -Source PSLogonBackground -LogName application
Then my script can use that as a source – since I don’t want to bother the user if the log isn’t configured I use -ErrorAction silentlycontinue here
write-eventlog -logname Application -source PSLogonBackground -eventID 31365 -ErrorAction silentlycontinue `
                -message "Loaded $($myImage.FullName) [ $($myImage.Width) x $($myImage.Height) ]"


The next thing the function does is to apply cropping and scaling image filters from the original image module as required to get the image to the right size.  When it has done that it tries to save the file, by applying a conversion filter and saving the result. The initial JPEG quality is passed as a parameter if the file is too big, the function loops round reducing the jpeg quality until the file fits into the 250KB limit and logs the result to the event log.

Set-ImageFilter -filter (Add-ConversionFilter -typeName "JPG" -quality $JPEGQuality –passthru) -image $myimage -Save $saveName
$item = get-item $saveName
while ($item.length -ge 250kb -and ($JPEGQuality -ge 15) ) {
      $JPEGQuality –= 5
      Write-warning "File too big - Setting Quality to $Jpegquality and trying again"
      Set-ImageFilter -filter (Add-ConversionFilter -typeName "JPG" -quality $JPEGQuality -passThru) -image $myimage -Save $saveName
      $item = get-item $saveName
}
if ($item.length -le 250KB) {
          write-eventlog -logname Application -source PSLogonBackground -ErrorAction silentlycontinue `
           -eventID 31366 -message "Saved $($Item.FullName) : size $($Item.length)"
 }

That’s it. If you download the module  remove the “Internet block” on the zip file and expand the files into \users\YourUserName\windowsPowerShell\modules, and try running New-logonbackground  (with –Verbose to get extra information if you wish).
If the permissions on the folder have been set, the registry key is set,  pressing [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] should reveal a new image.  YOU might want to use a different keyword or a different path or start by trying to use a higher JPEG quality in which case you can run it with parameters as needed.

Then it is a matter of setting up the scheduled task: here are the settings from my scheduler

The program here is the full path to Powershell.exe and the parameters box contains
-noprofile -windowstyle hidden -command "Import-Module Image; New-logonBackground"

Lock, unlock and my background changes. Perfect. It’s a nice talking point and a puzzle – sometimes people like the pictures (although someone said one of a graveyard was morbid) – and sometimes they wonder how the background they can see is not only not the standard one but not the one they saw previously.