Personalization Enable or Disable Show Lock Screen Background on Sign-in Screen in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable show lock screen background on the sign-in screen for your account or all users in Windows 11.

The lock screen is the screen you see at startup and when you lock (Win+L) the PC. You will need to dismiss the lock screen to to see the sign-in screen and sign in to Windows.

The lock screen background picture will show on the sign-in screen by default.




EXAMPLE: Show lock screen background on sign-in screen turn on and off







1 Open Settings (Win+I).

2 Click/tap on Personalization on the left side, and click/tap on Lock screen on the right side. (see screenshot below)



3 Turn On (default) or Off Show the lock screen background picture on the sign-in screen for what you want. (see screenshot below)


4 You can now close Settings if you like.

This option changes the same setting in Option One.

1 Open Windows Terminal, and select Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell.

2 Copy and paste the command below into the terminal, and press Enter to find the SID for all accounts. Make note of the SID (ex: "S-1-5-21-287225801-2666723749-2829572351-1001") for the account you want to turn on or off Show the lock screen background picture on the sign-in screen for. (see screenshot below)



3 Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe).

4 Navigate to the registry key location below in the left pane of Registry Editor. (see screenshot below)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SystemProtectedUserData\<SID>\AnyoneRead\LockScreen

Substitute <SID> in the path above with the actual SID from step 2.

For example:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SystemProtectedUserData\S-1-5-21-287225801-2666723749-2829572351-1001\AnyoneRead\LockScreen

5 In the right pane of the LockScreen key, double click/tap on the HideLogonBackgroundImage DWORD value to modify it. (see screenshot above)

6 Change the "value data" to 0 (on - default) or 1 (off) for what you want, and click/tap on OK. (see screenshot below)


7 You can now close Windows Terminal and Registry Editor if you like.

You must be signed in as an administrator to use this option.

1 Do step 2 (enable) or step 3 (disable) below for what you want.

This is the default setting to allow users to use Option One and Option Two.

(Contents of REG file for reference)

This will disable showing a sign-in screen background image.

This will remove the Show the lock screen background picture on the sign-in screen setting in Option One, and prevents Option Two from working.

(Contents of REG file for reference)

4 Save the .reg file to your desktop.

5 Double click/tap on the downloaded .reg file to merge it.

6 When prompted, click/tap on Run, Yes (UAC), Yes, and OK to approve the merge.

7 You can now delete the downloaded .reg file if you like.


That's it,
Shawn Brink