Cycle Through Wallpapers Automatically With Desktop Drapes
I have a pretty large collection of wallpapers (and it’s growing all the time), but usually I’m content to just kind of let my desktop stay essentially the same for a few weeks, and then change it manually as I see fit. Nevertheless I thought it’d be cool to try out a little app I’ve been hearing about lately called Desktop Drapes.
Basically, Desktop Drapes is a GNOME applet that sit in your tray and automatically flips through your wallpaper collection at specific intervals. What I really like is that it monitors your wallpaper directory and automatically adds new images to the queue. If you don’t want your stuff changing automatically, you can just have it sit there, ready to pick a new wallpaper at random whenever your left-click on the icon.
It’s a little thing, but it’s nice to have around. Seems like Desktop Drapes probably has a permanent home on my GNOME desktop.
Do you like switch your wallpaper frequently, or do you pretty much leave it as is? What other apps like Desktop Drapes do you use?
sudo apt-get install drapes
I did this on Linux Mint to install it. I used to have this on my old install and it stopped watching my directory and even if I automatically added the backgrounds it would revert to its previous list. I hope I do not run into this issue again, but thanks for convincing and reminding me to reinstall this great app.
I use a panel applet called WallpaperTray
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WallpaperTray
@Aaron I had similar problems in previous Ubuntu releases but so far, it’s working great in Jaunty!
“Do you like switch your wallpaper frequently, or do you pretty much leave it as is? What other apps like Desktop Drapes do you use?”
I know this is an article about GNOME, and a GNOME app, but this last couple of questions apply to me as a KDE user also. In KDE I have my wallpaper set to watch my “Favorite Photos” folder in my “Pictures” folder and randomly cycle in a fresh wallpaper from there every hour (using the built in wallpaper settings of KDE). This way, every time I DO happen to see my desktop, there’s always something pleasing there to look at, even if it’s only for a moment. :)
It is nice to see that similar functionality is available for GNOME, and I have made note of both these apps (the one in the article, and the one in the comments) so that I can point other GNOME users to them.
Thank you for posting this useful little post, and I look forward to seeing what other nifty wallpaper related toys are offered up in future comments. :)
I’ve been using Drapes for a while now. While I did have problems with it reverting to the old list of wallpapers for a while, I’ve not had those problems since sometime before I upgraded to Jaunty. Despite this, I have never been able to get it to actually update the list whenever more images are added in my Wallpaper directory. Not really a big deal, as whenever I add anything, I make sure to update it manually.