Picture Library option not working on Desktop background

borisse · 19 Oct 2010

Hi, i had a slide show of my photos working nicely until yesterday. I think it stopped when i upgraded Adobe Flash - i have tried system restore but no joy there.

When i go to set "Picture Location" in "Choose your desktop background" i can't set the Picture Library setting. If i browse to one of my picture folders the box shows "This folder is empty".

I've tried quite a few things from the forum for similar sounding problems but have made no progress

hope someone can help!

borisse · 19 Oct 2010

OK - i solved my own problem....

Indexing had been turned off - started it running again and problem solved.

Hoorah!

Trucidation · 19 Oct 2010

Nearly the same thing I experienced: after an Adobe Reader update and system restart, browsing to any folder in Picture Location will not select it - I'm stuck with the default folders in the dropdown box.

Originally posted here -> https://www.sevenforums.com/customiza...locations.html

If you create another user account it seems to work for that account. However, I just found out that it broke on that new account today (just under a week)! Wonder how they are saving those image locations, why can't it simply be a bunch of registry keys?

Dunno if this is part of the problem though: I remove all folders from any library and delete the junctions when creating a new account (I hate the library concept, I prefer to know where exactly a file is - folder hierarchies exist for a reason). I thought it shouldn't matter. Apps shouldn't be so crap as to break if they can't find the libraries or "default" folders anyway.

Edit: Indexing? That's... strange. I'll give it a try. I moved all my wallpapers to C:\pix and it seems that isn't included in the index.

borisse · 19 Oct 2010

Hope the indexing works for you Trucidation ! It's taken me a long time to a find a really simple solution, though i haven't worked out how indexing got turned off ...

Trucidation · 19 Oct 2010

Thanks, but adding C:\pix didn't work. My indexing was already on though, didn't seem like it got switched off.

It's a head scratcher. Picture Location lets you browse for additional folders... so why isn't it accepting any folders?

One other oddity. I downloaded a "Desktop changer" and THAT program somehow managed to get it's folder added to the dropdown box in Picture Location. There must be someplace where Win7 is storing these locations, the question is where?

Edit:
Okay, a workaround. Was poking around in the registry and noticed that there was one string in this key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpaper\KnownFolders\0\Windows Wallpapers\MergeFolders ...I know, suspicious, right? The previous 4 parent keys in the hierarchy all contain only a single empty REG_SZ value each. So I was thinking, what's the deal with this string, why is it named like a folder (C:\Windows\(something, sorry forgot what)). On a whim renamed the string to C:\pix and changed its value also to C:\pix.

Hey presto, when I went back to Personalization, selecting Windows Wallpapers from the dropdown menu took me to my wallpapers (C:\pix). Browsing for additional folders in Picture Location is still broken but at least now I can manually change where "Windows Wallpapers" in the dropdown is pointing to. It works, shuffle and everything.

This is enough of a solution for me, although it'd be nice if there was a real fix for the broken Picture Locations feature.