How to change the background image for Microsoft Teams

Video-conferencing

We’ve all been using some kind of conferencing tool for staff meetings, department meetings or even sale meetings. This article focuses on video conferencing in Microsoft Teams but there are other video conferencing tools available. More so it focuses on changing the background image for Microsoft Teams.

Teams background

When you start a Teams video conference meeting and put your camera on up comes your background! What background? Wherever you’re sat. Perhaps you have a dedicated office or have to use your bedroom as your office space… everyone on the meeting is privy to your personal space tidy or not 🙂

There are some standard Microsoft Teams template backgrounds available; office space, beach view, balloons or just good old blur. That’s great and they’re fun but… they can’t portray the professional image your business would like to continue to portray.

It’s actually really easy but everything is when we know how to do it! So here goes:

Start a Teams meeting (just on your own for now) – just click ‘meet’ at the top right hand corner of the Teams screen

Show background effects

Once your (Billy no mates!) meeting starts then you can start to play around with backgrounds.

Click the 3 dots (I’ve highlighted these in yellow for you below). Next select ‘show background effects’.

Up pops your choices of standard Microsoft Team Backgrounds. Make a choice then ‘preview’ or ‘apply’. You can always follow the same steps to change this.

Add your own branded image

Even better, you can add your own business branding by adding a bespoke image. Just click the ‘Add new’ button (highlighted below).

You’ll need to have an image with a minimum size of 360 x 360px and maximum of 2048 x 2048 px. Format can be .jpg, .png or .bmp but I would suggest .jpg for the best result.