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When you open up the Steam app, for the first time in a day, or go to View > Update News, Steam gives news about sales are on, like this one for La-Mulana 2.

The images used seem to be variants of the actual page for the store at the time, but not exactly, like the app's image for the September 2020 Deep Silver Publisher Weekend is animated, but the background image for the actual store page, is not, but I want a copy of that animation.

Is there any way to download them from somewhere, or are they stored on my computer somewhere?

The Update News doesn't seem to be a webpage that's actually usable by a browser.

Possibly info from my previous question on Steam art might help. " Is there a way to download the box art for Steam games? "

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Since this method is not the intended user level access of Steam resources, please consider these steps as fitting only for discussion. Since Steam has made the interfaces and the window especially to not support making copies from there, I'm also not suggesting to do it.

However, yes, you are correct that all these are stored on your PC. For the case of a Windows10 OS, you will find all the "Update News" pictures at the local temporary folder:

c:\Users\ [YOUR LOGGED IN USERNAME] \AppData\Local\Steam\htmlcache\Cache\

However what you find here is a list of objects without extensions, which do include the pictures, but also other elements too, like elements from Friends list. You may want to somehow filter out the irrelevant ones.

So as best effort, you can do the following on same day when it is available on News:

  1. Close steam if it is running (not running on tray icon, but really shut down the app) (this step might not be necessary, but this is the way how you can do it for sure)
  2. From the listed items on the path above you may delete all "f_00..." files (I suggest to not delete the "index" and "data..." files)
  3. Start steam and log in. Depending on your settings, Store might automatically open up, or not, for this case the better if sooner opened up, because: these freshly downloaded files will have their timestamp (as of now like 12:57 here).
  4. You wait for the next minute (or so), and hit Update news button. Depending on the browsing history, you may get either the normal pictures per page, or a broken reference icon, which you can easily remediate with a Next> then <Previous button, so it will (down)load it.
  5. Now check back to the path, you will have some "f_00..." files (1...20...or so) new timestamp (like 13:02) there. These are the relevant files now.
  6. Up to your choice, you may analyze or rename them with a tool or manually doing it, renaming them to .jpg extension and checking for the one you wanted, you will eventually find it. Alternatively (and bit improving) that Malady suggested in the comments, you can just drag&drop the files 1-by-1 into a browser window, that will also show you the file content.

You have some chance to find it still on later days if this cache folder was not updated with following days Update News.

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  • For Firefox, "view-source:file:///[location]" makes the browser interpret the files into PNGs or whatever it actually is.
    – Malady
    Commented Sep 21, 2020 at 19:02
  • To stay technically correct, it does not interpret. The object being stored is jpeg (or other picture format) data, just managed as internal asset resources, which require no human-friendly file naming convention. View-source is nothing more than opening up the exact file with a reader application, you still need to go through the file hunting "burden".
    – Sonic
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 8:04
  • True. I still think you should mention it in Part 5, in case people don't know of that easy method. Comments Are Temporary after all... I found what I'm looking for, so. Thanks!
    – Malady
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 9:55
  • Correct, and even given a bit more thought to it to be easier, thanks for indirectly reminding me on it :) If this now fulfills a round answer, I appreciate if you mark it as answered question.
    – Sonic
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 13:21
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    I personally validated with Firefox, and only then I wrote here that it works :) If you drag and drop a file from your PC, it will not want to download it.
    – Sonic
    Commented Sep 22, 2020 at 15:08

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