How To Extract Individual Images From Installed Windows 7 Themes

Some of the themes created for Windows 7 are pretty impressive (I am currently sporting the NASA spacescapes for those interested). However, if you don’t want a slide-show of images which typically come with a theme, rather just a single image in the theme you can easily “extract” it.

Once a theme is installed on your system, simply open Windows Explorer to: “C:\Users\[your_user_name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\[theme_name]” and from here you can navigate to the folder containing the pictures and copy the image(s) you want. From here the process of setting it to your background is simple enough.

For those so inclined, you can open the respective ‘.theme’ file in Notepad and see the full information regarding the theme (cursors and sounds used, etc.) so you if you want to “extract” additional resources, this will point you to where these files are located.

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