Use Pick Background with a personal Gmail account

Pick Background works with both kinds of Google accounts: free @gmail.com accounts and Google Workspace accounts from your work or school. Setup is the same for both. See Set up your first rule. There are a few differences worth knowing on a personal account.

Meetings without a title

Meetings you schedule in Google Calendar have a title, and Pick Background matches on it. But meetings started with New meeting in Google Meet usually have no title. The preview screen just says Ready to join?.

For those, Pick Background uses the meeting code instead. That's the part of the link after meet.google.com/, like abc-defg-hij. When you click Create a rule on an untitled meeting, the rule is pre-filled with the code.

• This works well for a link you reuse, such as one from Create a meeting for later that you share with the same group every week. The code stays the same, so the rule keeps matching.
• An instant meeting gets a new code every time, so a rule won't match the next one. For those, set a default background instead.

The backgrounds menu looks different

On a Workspace account, Google Meet's backgrounds button opens a small menu first. On a personal account it opens the backgrounds panel directly. Pick Background handles both, so you don't need to do anything differently.

Make sure you're up to date

Personal Gmail support arrived in version 1.3.0. The version number is at the bottom of the Pick Background popup. Chrome updates extensions on its own, but if you see an older version, go to chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, and click Update.