Did you know? Microsoft offers really cool Teams backgrounds to improve your meetings and video conferences. You can download all of them here: Custom backgrounds gallery for Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Adoption.
Currently (as of today when I write this) there are 90 backgrounds for download on that site. It doesn’t make fun to download all of them manually. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t provide a comprehensive zip file for download. So I had a look at the download URLs and saw that they all start the same and and with an ongoing number. So I told myself “hey, that can be automated!”. In result, I wrote a short script to download all images (you can also download it directly from my GitHub repository):
Clear-Host
$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$numberOfBackgrounds = 100
$targetFolder = "C:\tmp\Teams Backgrounds\"
$FilenameStart = "https://adoption.azureedge.net/wp-content/custom-backgrounds-gallery/user-submitted-background-"
#$FilenameStart = "https://adoption.azureedge.net/wp-content/custom-backgrounds-gallery/VIVA-background-Abstract-0"
#$FilenameStart = "https://adoption.azureedge.net/wp-content/custom-backgrounds-gallery/VIVA-background-office-0"
#$FilenameStart = "https://adoption.azureedge.net/wp-content/custom-backgrounds-gallery/VIVA-background-home-0"
$FilenameFormat = ".jpg"
Write-Host "Downloading background images " -NoNewline
1..$numberOfBackgrounds | ForEach-Object{$url = $FilenameStart + $_.ToString() + $FilenameFormat; Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -OutFile( $targetFolder + $url.Split("/")[$url.Split("/").length - 1] ) -UseBasicParsing -ErrorAction 'SilentlyContinue'; Write-Host "." -NoNewline}
#copy to Teams images folder
$list = Get-ChildItem $targetFolder
foreach($file in $list)
{
Copy-Item $file.FullName -Destination ($env:APPDATA + "\Microsoft\Teams\backgrounds\Uploads")
}
Write-Host "`n`nNew background images successfully saved. Please restart Teams to use the backgrounds." -ForegroundColor Magenta
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)As you see, the scrip is quite simple and can also be used for other downloads, if you have similar situations. The only thing you have to do is to adjust the source by changing the variable $FileNameStart and the $targetFolder to control where the images are stored.
The script copies all images to the Teams folder, where it stores the custom images. Don’t forget to restart your Teams client after download.
There are more sites with cool backgrounds (found on 100+ Funny Teams Backgrounds – Microsoft Teams (lazyadmin.nl)):
- Ikea: https://backgroundsbyikea.com/
- Pixar: https://news.disney.com/pixar-video-backgrounds-available
- Star Wars: https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-backgrounds
Other cool sites to grab backgrounds:
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