Is there a nice free program to use to automatically change desktop wallpapers?

August 9, 2004 12:40 AM

I've got rather a lot of desktop wallpapers. Is there any nice (freeware) program I can use to automatically change these? I'm using Windows XP.
posted by stoneegg21 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

What about this?
posted by Space Coyote at 1:23 AM on August 9, 2004

there's an xp power toy on the ms site. does the job well enough, but it wanders through the list rather than being random.
posted by twine42 at 2:37 AM on August 9, 2004

This is the second time in a few days that someone has asked a question I was just begining to idly wonder about. (Wireless power being the other.) Thanks much.


I also just found this but haven't tried it yet.
posted by CunningLinguist at 5:33 AM on August 9, 2004

Check this page at virtual plastic. It lists several useful and free apps that do just what you ask.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:23 AM on August 9, 2004

PictureShare.net has a free app that will manage them all and fade them in and out, a la Mac. It's free, and seems pretty harmless.
posted by gramcracker at 7:22 AM on August 9, 2004

Not useful response: I had this conundrum a while ago, and started writing just such a program. It was really cool and could do neat things with scaling like xv and some other cool tricks like blending semi-transparent wall papers with your desktop colour. Then I lost all the source in a hard drive crash :(
posted by Capn at 8:04 AM on August 9, 2004

For what it's worth, Quickchanger seemed really cool but just completely froze up my computer (win xp).
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:20 AM on August 9, 2004

Webshots works for me, and gives me new wallpapers every so often.
posted by ruwan at 1:50 PM on August 9, 2004

If anyone wanders across this through searching, I ended up using dWall. It didn't suck, which put it above many of the others. For instance, Quickchanger looks pretty cool but used a hideous resizing algorithm in scaling up. I think it just repeats rows. And Pictureshare makes you add each wallpaper to a list, so you can't just have a wallpaper directory that you dump files in. Dwall is simple, doesn't have an ugly skin, has a few useful options, and does the job. Only negative is that you have to specify wallpaper change time in minutes, when I want something more like days. Calculator solves that problem though.
posted by smackfu at 9:23 PM on August 29, 2004