If you have family pictures or photos from years of trips, it’s hard not to stop and stare at the rotating lock screen display for a while. It’s new in Windows 8.1 there’s nothing like it in Windows 7 and the only option in Windows 8 was to choose a single static photo for the lock screen. In Windows 8.1, Microsoft made the lock screen more dynamic by adding this feature to display random photos, cycling through full-screen displays of single images and occasional collages of several pictures. Most of us are accumulating huge numbers of photos but we seldom go back and look through them and there hasn’t been any easy way to create random displays.

Screensavers went out of fashion because flat-screen displays do not suffer from burned-in images and our computers have gotten much better about turning off the monitor instead to save power. In the distant past we had screensavers that could display photos (or flying toasters). By default Windows 8 shows a stylized drawing of the Seattle skyline and Windows 8.1 shows bright curved rainbow stripes. Hit a key, type in your password, and it’s gone.

Most of you see it briefly when the computer restarts or when you come back to the computer after the monitor has turned off. The lock screen is the full-screen picture that comes up before you log in to Windows 8. It’s a surprisingly fun distraction if you have an ever-expanding collection of photos. Windows 8.1 can display a slide show of your photos on the lock screen.

Windows 10 randomly goes to lock screen