Version 5.0 of John’s Background Switcher for Windows brings a couple of notable changes and a bunch of bug fixes. The most major is that instead of choosing from one source at a time (e.g. Flickr, Unsplash, etc.) JBS will now select photos from all sources at once when changing – this means you can have montages with photos from all the sources available at once. Next the most requested photo source – Google Photos – has been added. About time too! Also I’ve put a lot of work into making JBS look better on high DPI “retina” screens as it rather sucked before.
Features and Changes:
- 13360: Add Google Photos integration
FEATURE: You can now choose photos from Google Photos. Pick albums, recent photos or photos from a pre-defined selection of categories. It’s been a long time coming! - 13587: Choose from all active photo sets from all sources at the same time
FEATURE: Previously JBS would only show pictures from one source at a time, so you could have sets from Flickr, Unsplash and Pixabay, but if you used a montage mode then you’d only ever see photos from one at a time. Now you’ll see photos from all active sets from all sources. Yay! Note that this means no more different picture mode per source, but you can’t have it all. - 13593: Translate JBS into Hungarian
FEATURE: JBS has now been translated into Hungarian. Thanks Attila! - 12696: Add the option to change the calendar font size
FEATURE: As well as changing the calendar font you can now change the size too! It’s been a long time coming. - 13585: Improve the layout and icons on high DPI displays
CHANGED: More and more people have high resolution displays and JBS didn’t look great to be fair. Now things should look a lot better with easier to read icons and a few layout fixes. - 13586: Move all the photo cache folders to one place
CHANGED: To cut down on photo caches on your machine JBS has consolidated the per-source montage and mosaic cache folders into one folder for montages and one for caches. This matches the Mac version and is a lot more efficient and should therefore take up less space on your hard drive. - 13611: Remove the folder shuffle functionality so that it works the same as all the other sources
CHANGED: Previously, if you used a single picture per monitor and local folders, JBS would keep track of the photos shown so that it shuffled through them all before showing any again. Now that JBS chooses from all photo sources at once this inconsistent behaviour (in that it only applied to local folders) has now been removed. This has the added benefit of me no longer hearing from countless people telling me they keep seeing repeats when I could prove that they weren’t (the human brain sees patterns when there aren’t any). Now it will show repeats by design! And behave the same as all the other web-based sources. Consistency is King!
Bug Fixes:
- 13565: Update the Vladstudio integration to work with the latest Vladstudio web update
FIXED: I’ve now updated Vladstudio integration so it works again – yay! - 13589: Tumblr RSS feeds are broken in Europe
FIXED: Tumblr RSS feeds wouldn’t work in the EU thanks to their GDPR “implementation”. Now JBS can consume them again. - 13588: Never show again was sometimes storing a non-unique Id and could exclude other photos
FIXED: You’d probably never notice it, but it’s fixed anyway! - 13554: Crash when trying to show an error message that’s too long
FIXED: A change in the Vladstudio API meant JBS tried to show an enormously long error message which then caused JBS to crash. This has now been fixed and long error messages won’t cause crashes. - 13440: Unsplash polaroid piles show no pictures when captions are enabled
FIXED: If you used a polaroid pile with captions enabled and Unsplash photos you’d often end up with a blank screen. This has now been corrected. - 13408: Deal with Instagram authentication going to the Instagram homepage when you log in
FIXED: When authenticating with Instagram, sometimes Instagram would show the wrong login page and you’d end up at the Instagram homepage instead of the “authorisation successful” page. This has now been fixed.