Customize the Lock and Sign-In Screens

The Windows 11 Lock screen appears when you wake up, power on, or lock your PC.

When you tap a key, click the mouse, or touch the display, the Sign-in screen appears so you can sign-in and get to work.

Tip: When configured, features like Presence Sensing and Windows Hello facial recognition work together to sign you in immediately, bypassing the Lock and Sign-in screens.

Defaults

The Lock screen is configured with the following defaults:

• The background is provided by Windows spotlight, which displays a new, high-quality photo from Bing every day. These photos are pleasant and of very high quality, and they are accompanied by interactive and informational bubbles that provide you with more details about that day’s photo.
• A large, centered time and date display.
• A Network status icon and, for laptops, a battery life status icon with percentage in the bottom right of the display.
• With a new install, you will see a single widget, centered on the bottom of the screen, for Weather that displays the weather forecast using the current location and temperature unit. But it is more likely that your Lock screen displays four widgets aligned horizontally, which is the maximum Windows 11 allows.
• If an app is playing media and your PC’s screen is locked, you will also see basic media playback controls below the Weather widget or whatever widgets you’ve configured to appear on the Lock screen.

The Sign-in screen is configured with these defaults:

• The background is the same as that used by the Lock screen, so it uses Windows spotlight by default as well.
• The profile picture and username for the most recently signed-in user appears center on-screen with PIN, password, and other sign-in options.
• If there are multiple users configured on this PC, you will see icons for them in the lower left of the screen.

Customize the Lock and Sign-in screens

You can customize the Lock screen and Sign-in screen if desired.

Customize the Lock screen

The Lock screen is surprisingly customizable, though the options fall into two main categories: The background it displays and the widgets it can contain. Each can be configured in the Settings app by navigating to Personalization > Lock screen.

Configure the Lock screen background

The “Personalize your lock screen” option lets you configure the type of background the Lock screen displays.

There are three choices.

Windows spotlight. As noted above, this is a different high-quality image each day with accompanying details about the image.

Picture. This lets you choose an image using a grid of recent images or click “Browse photos” to find a specific image.

Slideshow. This presents a more complicated set of options with two “albums” (the contents of your Pictures folder and the Public Pictures folder) preselected as the sources for the slideshow, a lame “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen” option you can toggle on or off, and a list of advanced slideshow settings.

Configure the widgets on the Lock screen

If you are starting with a new installation of Windows 11 in 2026, the “Widgets” option will be enabled along with a single widget, Weather. But it’s more likely that you will see multiple widgets enabled, with Daily Wonder, Daily Discovery, and Events Near You appearing as well. You can display up to four widgets on the Lock screen, and they will appear next to each other horizontally at the bottom of the display.

Regardless, you can make the following customizations here.

Disable widgets on the Lock screen. To disable widgets on the Lock screen entirely, configure “Widgets” to “Off.”

Reposition a widget. If you have two or more widgets enabled, you can reposition them from left to right on the Lock screen by dragging them up or down, respectively, in the list of widgets that appears under “Widgets.” To do so, just grab a widget in the list with the mouse cursor and move it.

Customize a widget. If you click the “More options” (“…”) link to the right of a widget in the list under “Widgets” and see a “Customize widget” item in the pop-up menu that appears, then you can configure it in some way. Only a few widgets support this. Weather is one of them: You can configure its temperature unit to be Celsius or Fahrenheit and its location to be the detected location, your default location, or any other location.

Remove a widget. You can remove any widget in this list by clicking the “More options” (“…”) link to its right and selecting “Remove” from the pop-up menu that appears.

Add a widget. If you click the “+ Add Widget” button, you can choose between several widgets or click a “Find more widgets” link to browse the available widgets in the Microsoft Store.

Tip: You can only display four widgets on the Lock screen. If you already have four widgets and add a new widget, it will replace the fourth one in the list. And some widgets will not work on the Lock screen because they don’t support the required size.

Let Windows suggest widgets for the Lock screen. The option “Suggest widgets for your lock screen” is a bit misleading. If you enable this option, it won’t suggest widgets, it will add three widgets–Daily Wonder, Daily Discovery, and Events Near You–to your Lock screen.

Customize the Sign-in screen

The Sign-in screen has just two options you can customize. Oddly, they are found in different places in the Settings app.

Show the lock screen background picture on the sign-in screen. This option is found in Settings > Personalization > Lock screen and it is enabled by default. If you configure it to “Off,” the Sign-in screen will display a plain black background instead of the Lock screen background.

Show account details such as my email address on the sign-in screen. This option is found in Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options in the “Additional settings” section and it is disabled by default. If you enable it, the email address associated with your sign-in account will appear below your name, if available.

Use the Lock screen like an interactive smart display

While the Lock screen isn’t necessarily ideal for these use cases, it’s possible to use it interactively in certain circumstances. The problem is that the Lock screen is designed to be transient. So even if your PC isn’t configured to launch immediately into a Windows Hello-based sign-in, you can easily click on-screen with the mouse or tap a key on the keyboard and dismiss the Lock screen purposefully or not.

That said, you can view the Lock screen at any time by opening Start, clicking the “Power” button in its bottom-right, and choosing “Lock” from the pop-up menu that appears. This is called “locking” your PC, and it’s a way to keep your current sign-in session active while preventing others from accessing it. But you can also trigger it to use specific Lock screen features.

Keyboard shortcut: You can also lock your PC by typing Windows key + L.

Some key examples include:

Display photo slideshows. If you can figure out the Slideshow interface I glossed over above, you can use the Lock screen to display your personal photos in slideshow form. This may seem nice, but photo slideshows are subject to the finicky nature of the Lock screen. Plus they lack some obvious features you get when you use a slideshow for the Desktop background, like the ability to shuffle or determine how long each photo displays. It’s better than nothing. But why these two slideshow interfaces in Windows 11 are so different is unclear.

View and interact with widgets. While this isn’t the easiest way to do so, you can view and interact with the widgets on your Lock screen while the PC is locked. If you click a widget, Windows 11 will shift to the Sign-in screen or just sign you in with Windows Hello, and then display the widget’s underlying webpage or app. For example, if you click the Weather widget, after you sign-in to Windows, Microsoft Edge will open and display the MSN website with a set of weather displays at the top.

Control media playback. If you’re playing a video or music or some other audio in a web browser or other app and lock the screen, the Lock screen displays media playback controls below the widgets. This display identifies the content playing and provides Previous, Play/Pause, and Next buttons.

Tip: You don’t have to lock the screen to access these controls outside the browser or other app that’s playing content. You can see and use the same interface above Quick settings, too.