3Enable windows desktop slideshow with a script

I’ve been updat­ing my unat­ten­ded win­dows deploy­ment setup recently, and one of the things I wanted to enable was the slideshow wall­pa­per with the loc­a­tion set to my wall­pa­pers loc­a­tion on my serv­er. This isn’t as straight-for­ward as it ought to be, but after bit of fid­dling around I figured out how to do it fairly simply.

2 parts are neede — a reg script and copy­ing a file (which I do via a self-extract­ing archive file).

The reg script is as follows

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Personalization\Desktop Slideshow]
"Interval"=dword:000927c0
"Shuffle"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Wallpapers]
"SlideshowSourceDirectoriesSet"=dword:00000001
"BackgroundType"=dword:00000002
"SlideshowDirectoryPath1"="/long-random-looking-string-goes-here"

Note — you will need to set up the slideshow with the cor­rect path on one of your PCs and then export the value for “SlideshowDirectoryPath1” from your registry for this to work

The second part is to copy a file called slideshow.ini (also after set­ting up your own slideshow) which lives in %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes

The con­tents of this file con­tain an encoded ref­er­ence to the loc­a­tion of your slideshow I believe.

Once you have copied the file and impor­ted the reg file you just need to restart explorer or wait for the inter­val peri­od to pass (mine is set to 10 minutes) and I have shuffle turned on — your val­ues may be dif­fer­ent if you set them dif­fer­ently and export the changed val­ues from the registry

I have put my slideshow.ini into a self-extract­ing exe that extracts to (and silently over-writes) %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes. I then run my 2 com­mands using the fol­low­ing Syn­chron­ousCom­mands in my ImageUnattend.xml

<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
  <Order>6</Order>
  <Description>Set slideshow location</Description>
  <CommandLine>c:\extras\slideshow.exe</CommandLine>
</SynchronousCommand>
<SynchronousCommand wcm:action="add">
  <Order>7</Order>
  <Description>Enable slideshow</Description>
  <CommandLine>c:\extras\elevate -c reg import c:\extras\slideshow.reg</CommandLine>
</SynchronousCommand>

For more inform­a­tion about my use of the com­mand “elev­ate” and hav­ing files in the c:\extras folder please read my pre­vi­ous art­icle about how I used a “Batch script to rename PC based on reserved DHCP name”