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How to Fix Windows Spotlight Not Working (ADMTheme issue)

In this post, I'll explain how to fix windows spotlight if it keeps reverting back to picture mode.

Introduction

Recently, I came across an issue. I love to use Windows Spotlight for my Background and Lockscreen. But on my MSI laptop, the background settings would always revert back to Picture with a default wallpaper.

I tried, and you should try as well, the following fixes :

  • Reset and register Windows Spotlight
  • Go into Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Edit Plan Settings
    • Change advanced power settings
    • Desktop Background settings > Slide Show ⇒ Paused for both.

And finally I figured what was wrong. A theme was auto-applied on start-up. How ?

  • Search msconfig on Windows :
    • System Configuration > Services
  • Search start-up applications on the Windows Task Manager

Found nothing unusual. But the auto-applie theme was called ADMTheme. It was related to AutoDarkMode apparently, a Windows tool to automatically switch your Windows color scheme.

Fix

The fix is quite simple.

  1. Uninstall AutoDarkMode
  2. Go into C:\Users\%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\AutoDarkMode and delete this folder.
  3. Reboot
  4. Open a CMD as admin and type in the following command : winget install --id=Armin2208.WindowsAutoNightMode -e
  5. Reboot

Now you can open AutoDarkMode, configure it to change with From sunset to sunrize (location services), and configure your windows background and lockscreen.

Your theme will be kept as ADMTheme, but it'll keep your changes.

The issue was probably caused by an old update of AutoDarkMode I reckon. Anyway, it's now fixed.

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