Without a Custom Background
With more and more people working from home, we find ourselves in on Teams conference calls in some strange settings (I work in my loft!) which can be distracting to say the least.
Earlier in the year Microsoft helped mitigate this while adding an element of fund to Teams calls with the introduction of background effects to the Teams Application but for some reason, they neglected to add a simple way to add custom backgrounds, so here’s how its done:
Adding Custom Backgrounds to Microsoft Teams
A custom background in Teams
Source an appropriate background image and size reasonably (I resize to 1920 x 1080 as this is ‘Full HD’ and so the maximum size people will generally see my Teams video) and the format should be JPG (other formats might work, I haven’t tried).
Once you have your image, you need to save it in the following location (changing ‘username’ for your username):
C:\Users\user.name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads
If you’re not sure what your username is, paste this path in to the explorer address bar instead:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\Backgrounds\Uploads
(this will use system variables to take you to the correct folder)
Copy or save the image there and start a Teams call
Turn on background effects as normal via the toggle
Scroll to the bottom fo the Background settings on the right and your custom backgrounds should be there!
The Image is the wrong way around!
You’ll notice when you see your own image, you’ll notice its actually flipped, thats because Microsoft Teams does the same thing with your camera feed (like a mirror), don’t worry the people on your call will see it as normal.
