There’s a way to get new wallpaper images every day on a GNU/Linux system

One of the apps I loved when I was a Windows user was Webshots, a great app for not only rotating wallpaper images but also for finding new wallpapers. Of course it’s only available for Windows so GNU/Linux users have to manually look for new wallpapers and use another app for changing walls on a regular basis. I’ve used Desktop Drapes, which is a really nice app for managing and changing your desktop wallpaper, but for the longest time I kept going back to WallpaperTray. The big plus for WallpaperTray is that you can not only look for specific wallpapers but the icon is a thumbnail of the wallpaper image itself and if you hover your cursor over the icon it tells you the path and filename for the active wallpaper. This is a big plus if you have a lot of wallpapers across a number of directories.

In the past I looked at Webilder, which lets you not just manage your wallpapers but can get new images every day from Flickr once you set up the search parameters for the wallpapers you want to use. To get new images they use a number of preset channels that use tags to search for new images. I don’t recall why I decided against using Webilder in the past but I had.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading somewhere (I can’t recall where now) and someone mentioned Webilder for using Webshots images on GNU/Linux systems. I looked at the software a little more closely and decided to give it a whirl. It’s pretty nice, and can use any existing folders of wallpaper images you may already have, although unlike WallpaperTray you can’t specify multiple folders to watch.

Once you install Webilder you just have to add the applet to your panel. From the applet you can have a new random wallpaper selected, open the Webilder Desktop (the wallpaper management dialog), download new images, edit your Webilder preferences, and even delete the current wallpaper if you decide you’re tired of it. If you need to find out what a particular wallpaper is you just have to hover your mouse over the panel icon and you’ll get a tool tip with the name of the wallpaper and the album (the folder on your hard drive) it’s in.

Each wallpaper image Webilder finds gets an .inf file with information on the images it snags from Webshots or Flickr, as well as a thumbnail of the image itself for use in the Webilder Desktop. If you’re like me and have a separate folder of wallpaper images that you have on reserve to use later you’ll need to move both the wallpaper itself and the .inf file for the image. Among the walls I have on standby are holiday images like for Chrismukkuh, Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras. You don’t need to worry about moving anything in the thumbnail folders. Webilder won’t care if there’s extra thumbs available and when you move them back they’ll already be there when they’re needed again.

You can snag a deb file from GetDeb to install Webilder, and Behan Webster was kind enough to make a repository you can use to install it. The info for using either GetDeb’s or Behan’s repo is on Webilder’s download page, as is information on building it from source code.

As I said above, in addition to using your existing wallpaper images or images from Webshots they have created several channels of images for getting images from Flickr, but you can also create your own channels. Simply get into the Webilder Preferences and click on the Flickr tab. Click on the Add button and scroll down to the bottom of the Tags list. You’ll see an album called Album Name. Click on the album name to make it editable and call it whatever you want. Then do the same under Tags to give the album tags to search for. You can get more information on creating an album by clicking the Tips… button, and when you’re done editing the album close the dialog and tell Webilder to get new photos either by right clicking on the panel icon and selecting Download Photos or by using Tools > Download Photos from within the Webilder Desktop.

At first I simply created a folder for images from Webilder within my existing wallpaper folder but I ended up seeing active wallpapers from my Webilder thumbnail folders so I moved the folders Webilder created right into my root wallpaper folder. While Webilder doesn’t replace the icon with a thumbnail of the active wallpaper like WallpaperTray does but if you use Drapes you may not even realize that it’s an option. I contacted Nadav Samet, the developer of Webilder, and suggested it and he said he’d look into adding the feature in a future upgrade.

You don’t need an account on Flickr to use picture from there, but if you want to use Webshots images you will need a free account with them. If you set your Webilder preferences to download images from Webshots it will look for new images as it downloads new images. You can also download wallpaper images from Webshots yourself, but you’ll want to be careful when you do. Some of their wallpapers are for Premium users only, and if you try to download an image for Premium users you’ll get a page asking for your billing information so they can charge you $19.95 for a year of Premium membership. The thing you want to look for is that the Regular download button isn’t on a colored background like the top two buttons is.

You can also go through the archives to download older images, but as a regular member you can only download five wallpapers each day. That doesn’t include any picture you download that were uploaded by community members, though, so you can click on the Browse button at the top of the Webshots website and download as many pictures as you like. Regardless of how you download images from Webshots you’ll end up with .wbz files. You can either drag and drop the files onto the Webilder Desktop window or use File > Import Webshots files… and select as many files as you need to load them into Webilder. They’ll be put into albums according to how they’re organized on the Webshots site.

There is one problem with Webilder and your existing walls, which is that Webilder doesn’t know what to do with PNG images. This is the issue that I initially contacted Nadav about, and he told me that Webilder currently searches only for jpg files and then loads them. The good news is that the library Webilder uses to load JPG files can also load PNG files. It’s just a matter of someone writing a patch to let Webilder use PNG’s. I can’t code my way out of a wet paper sack so if someone wants to put in the effort to add the ability to use PNG images it would be greatly appreciated by both Nadav and myself. The only option for now is to convert your PNG images into JPG files. You will need ImageMagick installed, but once it is you just need to open a terminal window at the directory in question and run this command

for i in *png; do echo $i; convert $i ${i/png/jpg}; done

It won’t remove the PNG files, but it will create JPG files that Webilder can use.

There’s one more thing I want to point out about the images you download from wither Flickr or Webshots, and that there’s no way to specify the screen resolution you use, although you can opt to only download Landscape photos (Webilder Preferences > Advanced). What you can do is to go to the folder where Webilder puts the files and open them in your favorite image editor. Then you can resize and crop the files to fit your desktop.

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