Forum Discussion
MicrosoftNow in Public preview & Targeted release: Animated backgrounds in Teams meetings
MatthiasRodler Hi, thank you for this, but this method is what we gave been doing, and no longer works for us in Teams 2.0. Are you able to do this via New Teams? We can add the backgrounds in the same way as ‘Classic’, but only users with a Premium license can see and select them.
You can copy the background to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Microsoft\MSTeams\Backgrounds\Uploads - Note: images need to be named as a GUID, so rather than the original filename (e.g., CompanyBackground.jpg and CompanyBackground_thumb.jpg they will be named like 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.jpg and 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000_thumb.jpg)
Best way to generate the GUID for the image name is to open PowerShell and type "New-Guid" and press enter - this will generate a new guid to use for each image. Copy all of the images over and exit the new teams client and then reopen - your custom background will now be available again without adding 1 at a time.
Have also been able to confirm adding of custom animated gifs also work in new teams as well by copying the gif into the directory, then copying the gif, rename the - copy.gif to _thumb.gif, then rename both with the GUID and change the file extension from .gif to .jpg then exit and reopen teams. I found that if i copied the animated image from the classic teams directory and renamed as a GUID the background was static, so the file needs to be copied as a .gif first.
Confirmed working with the following new Teams client without a Team premium license
- with some PowerShell scripting yes you could push this out to a group of users, the following links have information on the scripting https://www.workplaceascode.com/2020/04/17/distribute-custom-backgrounds-for-teams-via-intune/ https://smbtothecloud.com/deploy-custom-backgrounds-to-new-teams-with-remediations/
Thanks SteveMacNZ - this is useful to know, but is this on a per user basis? We used to be able to do it via GPO meaning we could push it out to all users at the same time, that's what we're looking to achieve.
