Windows 8

For pre-release wallpapers and pictures, see Windows 8 Previews.

Windows 8 is an operating system released by Microsoft in 2012. It is the successor to Windows 7, and was followed by Windows 8.1 the following year. It introduced a new interface called the start screen, controversially replacing the start menu.

Wallpapers
Most of Windows 8's wallpapers were submitted by Microsoft employees as part of an internal contest, according to employee Bala Sivakumar who took img4.

It is the first Windows version since XP that does not credit the authors in the metadata; subsequent versions of Windows do not feature metadata credits either, although wallpapers from downloadable themes continue to do so. As a result of the images being produced in-house without the photographers being credited, it is unknown who took what, with the exception of img4 which appears on Sivakumar's Flickr. The Flowers theme would later reappear in 8.1 and 10 (although removed in 11), while the Earth theme would be replaced by the Lines and colors theme in 8.1, and the Windows 10 theme in 10.

Lock screen wallpapers
Windows 8 came with a few built-in lock screen wallpapers, some of which came 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 would reappear in 8.1.

At UX WEEK 2012, Jensen Harris, from the Windows design team, revealed that each of the lockscreen backgrounds was a reference to a design principle, as a sort of internal easter egg: img102 stood for "Authentically digital", img103 for "Fast and fluid", img104 for "Do more with less", and img105 for "Pride in craftsmanship", while img101's beehive symbolized the team's internal motto "Win as one".

User account pictures
Windows 8 has only two user account pictures used for default accounts and guest account respectively, both of which are identical. It is the first Windows version after Windows 2000 that does not come with a selection of pre-loaded user account pictures that the user can choose from.

Both pictures have resolutions of 448x448, higher than the previous 128x128; they were reused in Windows 8.1. Also included are PNG versions of both of the pictures and resized versions of the user picture, 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
As with previous version, the setup background is named background_cli. Since recovery menu was redone and does not use any background, it can only be seen during installation. It can be found in the  folder inside of Windows 8's DVD. The background itself consists of simply, the default accent color. The same background appears in Windows 8.1, 10 and 11.