the PA wallpaper dump

Been a while since I last wrote any guides here, but I figured it was time for a new one right about now

I'm sure some of you have at times wondered how you could automatically download and change wallpapers in Windows every X min./hours/days etc., and just the other day I finally came over a utility good enough that I actually bothered with it myself. Not only that, I also rewrote some of the code for the RSS feeds here at the PA wallpaper dump so that you can get fresh wallpapers without even opening your browser or feed reader. The utility I'm talking about is called John's Background Switcher (thanks to DonationCoder.com for the tip!). It's freeware and works on any Windows version starting with Win98.

Step 1:
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Download John's Background Switcher, install and start it. At first start it will ask it you want to use some example feeds, do as you wish when it does.


Step 2:
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Open the settings dialogue, then click "more settings." You will then be faced with these settings:

Configure as you wish, but you probably want to remove the mark in the box I've circled. You may also want to enter a size in the non-circled box where it says "only show pictures larger than" (though this doesn't really matter for feeds from this site).

Then click on "Advanced" and you will be faced with the following:

Again, configure as you wish but the circled setting is something you probably wish to set to something reasonable so the program doesn't slow down your login into Windows.

If you are gaming on your PC, or are running some other resource-intensive programs then you should proceed with clicking "Switching."

Here you can add the executables that when running, will stop the wallpaper download & switching. In my example, I've added the Steam overlay so that backgrounds will still be switched if I have Steam running by itself, but stop when actually running games from it. Just configure according to your needs.


Step 3:
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Now it's time to add a feed from one, or all, of our image categories here at the dump. The easiest way to get exactly what you want is to just browse to the gallery, enter the category you're interested in and configure the filters to your needs (for example, widescreen images with a width of 1680 or higher). When you've done so, the feed lists available from your browsers address bar have been configured with these settings so just click on the feed icon and select the one you want (last 25,50,75 or 100 images). Then copy the link to the feed.

Back in the settings dialogue of John's Background Switcher, you
- 1: Press "RSS Feeds."
- 2: Set the interval to something reasonable (please use 1 hour or higher to avoid hammering the server).
- 3: Press "Add" and paste the link you just copied, press "Test" to see that it works then hit OK and verify that it shows in the list.
- 4: Select how you want the images to display. It defaults to downloading several images and creating a mosaic or scrapbook of them so change that to something like "Scale pictures to FULL screen" (hit the question mark for explanations for the various options). If you leave the setting to mosaic or scrapbook, not only will it take a lot longer to download the pictures (after all, it'll have to fetch several of them and some may be quite large) but it will also require more resources to actually create the finalized wallpaper. It also saves me some bandwidth, something I'm always grateful for (I only have a set amount/month)!


Step 5:
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Enjoy a fresh wallpaper right from the dump! There are a lot of different things you can configure to your liking in John's Background Switcher, so play around with it!

Also, if you really like the utility, consider donating a little something to the developer John Conners (donate link can be found on the download page).