How to Set Up a Slideshow on the Surface 2 Lock Screen

The holidays are coming and maybe you are planning to have some fun. You will decorate the house with holiday decorations and perhaps you will want to show some pictures of your family or other things in your life. For some, Tablets have replaced digital photo frames as a way to showcase your digital photos. Apple’s iPads used to let you access a slideshow from your lock screen with a single button, but in iOS 7 that feature was removed although the button was still there. More in another post.

Create an animated slideshow on your Surface 2 lock screen

If you own a Surface 2 (or own a Surface Pro 2), you can set your Lock Screen to display an animated digital slideshow and proudly display it while you’re having fun, or just to entertain yourself. The Surface 2’s large screen sizes make for a really nice view when switching between your photos. There’s even a slight Ken Burns zoom effect for full-screen photos. While the photo selections may seem random, there is algorithmic mixing and matching going on behind the scenes. For example, if you’re in November and you have photos from the last Thanksgiving meeting, those photos will likely appear in your slideshow.

Here’s how to create a slideshow on the Surface 2 lock screen:

First, swipe in from the right. Then choose. Select at the bottom of the Settings menu. This brings you to the Windows PC settings. To choose .

Select Computers and Devices

then choose

Select Lock Screen

Here, a number of options are presented in a window called Toggle the switch below to the “on” position as we want to set up a slide show.

Screenshot (22)

You will see it just below. This lets you choose which folders in your Surface or Skydrive account to take pictures from. If you need to add a new folder to search for pictures, you can do so by pressing the plus button.

The next set of options includes:

This is off by default. This feature will add Camera Roll folder from this computer and SkyDrive. Windows Phone users will see photos taken on their phone in the slideshow if this is enabled.

If you’ve stored really odd-sized photos in your collection, you may not be able to see them in your animated slideshow.

This allows you to run your slideshow while running on battery power. If you want to recycle the battery on your Surface, turn it on and let the slideshow run. It will take some time but at least you can enjoy the slideshow while watching.

By default this is on and this is the control that turns your computer into a digital photo frame.

Below these options is a drop-down menu that lets you turn off the animated slideshow after 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, or Shutdown.