I am a huge fan of desktop themes and wallpaper collections.

Many of you already know that Microsoft has a dedicated section of the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 just for themes for Windows 10.

Windows Themes in the Microsoft Store

Currently there are 299 themes listed in the Microsoft Store and they cover a huge variety of subjects. Installation is straight forward – just select the theme you want to use on your device, click the install button in the Store and it will be downloaded and ready to use. This works just like installing an app from the Store.

This was a big shift from Windows 7 and 8.1 because themes had been provided as downloads through a Theme Gallery and you would manually install them after they were downloaded. However, back in 2014 due to resource constraints, those themes were pulled from the Microsoft site and became unavailable.

Many of them have made their way into the Microsoft Store but those packages are only compatible with Windows 10.

Well good news for those of you either still on Windows 7, 8.1, 10, or any other operating system that supports desktop wallpapers. Several of those past themes and wallpapers have re-appeared on the Microsoft Support site and are once again available for download.

There are 17 featured themes with a total of 233 images in them ranging from nature, cars, games, and space related collections. They are in the ThemePack format so they can be downloaded and activated as themes across your device. Some of these will have not only the wallpaper images but also may contain color and sound customization’s.

Featured Desktop Themes

Next up are 15 featured wallpapers that can be individually downloaded and used on any device regardless of the operating system.

Featured Wallpapers

Finally, there are 12 other categories of wallpapers to select images from:

• Animals (189 images)
• Art – Illustrative (82 images)
• Art – Photographic (144 images)
• Automotive (7 images)
• Games (42 images)
• Holiday & Seasons (158 images)
• Natural Wonders (254 images)
• Places & Landscapes (378 images)
• Plants & Flowers (242 images)
• Branded Wallpapers (63 images)
• From the Community (441 images)
• Panoramic (89 images)

That makes for a total of nearly 2,100 wallpaper images available for download and customizing your computing device.

Note: There are some images listed in multiple categories.

So if you look in the community category you will see two images that I sent into Microsoft during their open submission process for wallpaper images for Windows.

Orange flower close-up

Panoramic red rocks, looking toward Sedona, Arizona, U.S.

I think it is great that Microsoft has once again made these collections available for everyone’s use and yeah, it is pretty cool to have two of my own images in the mix!