I’ve been busy over the last month or so improving my wallpaper switching utility paying particular attention to adding more Flickr functionality. I’ve fixed a few bugs (including some problems with corporate firewalls), added lots more ways to get cool photos from Flickr, added proper multi-monitor support, improved the way pictures are resized, added an option to save all photos downloaded from Flickr to a folder and done a whole load of other cool things too.
If it were me, I’d just go and download John’s Background Switcher 2.1 now, you owe it to your computer to decorate it with amazing pictures!
Hi! I love it again – more – awesome!
One nit-pick. I noticed it will sometimes download the same picture from flickr. The pictures seem to be keyed by date time. Kind of cool to organize them that way, but the file system date modified can take care of that. Anyway to key them based on the flickr inique identifier instead, so that it would not keep or download the same image over and over?
Can you explain the speed vs. randomness ratio of the “select {N} number of pictures” feature?
Hi Phil!
I didn’t think of that (it was a last-minute addition), I’ll fix that in the next version. I’m planning on doing another release in the next week or so that’ll tidy up some features now that I’ve had a bit of feedback!
Okay, what the software does is say to Flickr ‘give me n pictures’ and Flickr returns a list of files. It doesn’t seem to take any more time to ask for 200 than 10 so there’s no time penalty there. The software then picks one from that list at random and asks Flickr for the picture’s size. If it’s happy with the size and the picture hasn’t been shown last time, it downloads it and sets it as the background. If not it removes it from the list, picks another at random and does the same again.
It does this whole thing each time it switches so potentially it’ll get a different 500 photos than the last time (if you have it set to choose from 500).
I’ve set the upper limit to be 500 photos because Flickr returns up to 500 photos at a time – if I wanted the next 500 I’d ask for page 2 from Flickr. It’s on my list to increase the limit at some point.
Oh, I’ve created a discussion forum for my switcher by the way to keep everything in one place:
http://johnsadventures.com/forum/