How to Change Your Zoom Background

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, businesses, organizations, and governments have resorted to non-physical ways of holding meetings shifting their attention to video conferencing apps such as Skype, GoogleMeet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. This is as everyone seeks to limit the spread of the virus by observing social distancing. One other good thing virtual meeting does is that it solves distance problems – you can join any meeting from anywhere in the world provided you have a good internet connection. Read more: How to Write a Script to Change Your Zoom Background Every Day

What does the script do?

Zoom does have an API that I could have used to change my background every day – but that seemed like too much effort for this task. Software developers are born lazy, right? 🙂

Instead, I found out that the Zoom application creates a copy of the background that gets selected in its preferences folder and references it. The script just takes in a random file and replaces it with this background file. And voila! A different Zoom virtual background is shown.

You can then put this in a cron job to be executed every day (or any frequency you prefer) to periodically change the background.

Get Set Up

I have put all the images I want to use as backgrounds in a folder in my user directory. Mine is at,  /zoom/bgpictures/, and that is what I use in the script. But it is a variable that you can change to whatever you want it to be.

Next, we set a Zoom virtual background in our application. It does not matter which background you choose. All we need is the unique ID that Zoom will assign to this background.

There might be some files already in the directory, but we want to select the one that corresponds to the image that we just uploaded to avoid replacing a different file.

The directory is located at: ~/Library/Application Support/zoom.us/data/VirtualBkgnd_Custom. The file name will be something like: 9WAE197F-90G2-4EL2-9M1F-AP784B4C2FAD. Read more: How to Write a Script to Change Your Zoom Background Every Day

BEFORE JOINING A MEETING:

1. Open the Zoom app on your computer and sign in.

2. Click your profile picture, then click on Settings. In the left menu bar, click on the Virtual Background tab (if you don\’t see this tab, log in to the Zoom website, go to Settings, and toggle on Virtual Background).

3. In the Virtual Background tab, select one of Zoom\’s defaults or upload your own image.

4. To add your own image/video, click the + icon to upload from your computer.

What next? Read more: How to Write a Script to Change Your Zoom Background Every Day

AFTER JOINING A MEETING:

1. At the bottom of the client, click the up arrow next to Video.

2. Select Change Virtual Background.

3. In the Virtual Background tab, select one of Zoom\’s defaults or upload your own image.

4. To add your own image/video, click the + icon to upload. Read more: How to Write a Script to Change Your Zoom Background Every Day