Windows 8.1

For pre-release wallpapers and pictures, see Windows 8.1 Preview.

Windows 8.1 is an operating system released by Microsoft in 2013. It is the successor to Windows 8; it retains the new start screen interface, while reintroducing the start button. It was followed by Windows 10.

Wallpapers
While Windows 8.1 reused the Flowers theme from Windows 8, it came with a new default wallpaper and replaced the Nature theme with the Lines and colors theme. It is not known where most of the wallpapers from this theme originate from, although one of them is known to be an altered photo from Getty Images. The others may also originate from Getty, although reverse search engines regard them as visually too simplistic to make a match.

Lock screen wallpapers
8.1 came with a few built-in lock screen wallpapers, some of which originate from Getty Images, while the others were created by Microsoft themselves, including graphic designer Marius Bauer, who worked as a freelance designer on the team for four months. Most of these were reused from 8.

User account pictures
Windows 8.1 has only two user account pictures used for default accounts and guest account respectively, both of which are identical. Both of these were reused from Windows 8. Like with 8, PNG versions of both of the pictures and resized versions of the user picture are included, probably used by Metro applications.

Picture Password
You can see this image in the Picture Password setup tutorial when setting it for the first time:

Setup background
The setup background called background_cli.bmp used by Windows 8.1 Setup. It was reused from Windows 8. It can be found in the  folder inside of the installation media. The background itself consists of simply, the default Windows 8 accent color. The same picture is also used in Windows 8, 10 and 11.