Using custom background images in SharePoint page sections

Not too long ago, Microsoft added some additional colors and gradients that you can use for section backgrounds on SharePoint pages. Now they’ve added one more feature that opens up a lot of possibilities… custom image section backgrounds. Here’s what that looks like and how it works…

When you are editing a page section, you’ll see the Add a background option. Click there to get the Upload image dialog screen:

For fun, I uploaded a minion image that I want to use for the section background, and then clicked Add image:

So I’ve uploaded the image, but where is it? It’s hidden under the Overlay color (in this case, white), and the Overlay opacity is set to 100%, which means you can’t see what’s underneath the overlay color. Click on More settings to see that information:

If you change the Overlay opacity option to 0, your image will show up. Adjust that setting anywhere in between if you want more of a “faded” background image in your section:

You can also choose Fill mode to designate how you want that image to show up in the section:

And if you need to alter the image a bit, click on the Advanced settings icon next to the Change background button in order to get some basic editing tools to modify your image:

Once you finish all that and publish your page, you’ll probably look at your section and you won’t see anything! That’s because a section won’t display if it doesn’t have any web parts associated with it. To make my section show up, I added a text web part and republished the page. Now I see my background image:

I’ll just add a caveat when it comes to this feature… just because you can doesn’t mean you should. A little goes a long ways here, and throwing a large number of random background images on a page could make it confusing and too busy.

For more information on this feature, check out Introducing the section backgrounds in SharePoint Pages and News.