Good free program that changes wallpapers...

G

Guitarrasdeamor

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Apr 5, 2008
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Well, I can never stay with one wallpaper for more than a few days at most, so I like to constantly change them. Anyone know of a good program that will do this and works on Vista x64? Has to be free.
Downloaded Wallpaper Master freeware version and it is pretty meh.
 
what i use is the yahoo widgets, which have a very configurable picture frame included with the base install. how i do it is set the picture to have no frame and resize from the top left, set the maximum picture size to your monitor's resolution, (i.e. 1680 for me) and then point the directory to your folder with all of your wallpapers. granted it will not stretch any pictures in said folder to your specified width, so make sure the pictures you have are in wallpaper dimensions (or bigger). then you can set the window level to "keep below all other windows", check the "ignore mouse" and "prevent dragging" and 'voila!' the "wallpaper" will cover your existing wallpaper and any desktop icons, so if you like a lot of desktop icons i don't suggest this method, but if you want a nice, clean desktop that changes periodically, go for it.
 
Since someone will say it, why not me...

Windows 7 has this finally as a basic feature of the OS... works great too. :D
 
yea the windows 7 one works good, i found it was better to just use the stock OS one than the 3rd party program. i had less problems.
 
bump

I'm also looking for software that does this but I would rather not be forced to use that pos Vista sidebar. I've been searching for a while now but cannot find anything good.
 
As of right now I'm using DisplayFusion on my desktop, which is not just strictly a wallpaper changer, as half the app is meant to add functionality to multiple displays (extra taskbar, window manipulation/spanning, etc). I tried both UltraMon and DF after seeing both recommended a lot here and on MaximumPC, UM in particular; but I liked DF better, partly because it does allow me to randomly change the wallpaper on both my displays and select a different source directory for the wallpapers of each display (really nice when one display is 16:10 and the other is 4:3). I think the free version (full is $15) doesn't have that functionality though, it lets you have different wallpapers on different displays (which NV drivers do as well, unlike ATI's), but not randomize it.

I'm actually looking for a free app to use on my netbook right now, I might just pay for a second DF key (you get a discount), gonna try Microsoft's free XP Power Toy Wallpaper Changer first though... It might be all I need on the netbook.
 
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I forgot about another one I had tried when I was messing with my dual displays and UltraMon & DisplayFusion... John's Background Switcher, it's still being activel developed/updated, I even e-mailed the guy to ask about a feature (related to multi-displays) and got a response within two days. I might use that one on the netbook if I'm unhappy with MS's Power Toy, it's 100% freeware.

Mostly I just want it not to take up a lot of resources, I know JBS' RAM usage spikes higher than DF's when it's switching, but other than that it behaved itself very well when I tried it and had some nice options such as automatically adjusting background color after detecting the most predominant one on your wallpaper (if it's not a full-screen wallpaper). Will let ya know about MS' Power Toy after I try it in a few min, I heard it works fine in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode...

Oh and W7 has this functionality built in btw, though maybe not as full-featured as something like JBS (which lets you use FB/Flikr image sources as well, amongst other things).
 
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Alright, I re-downloaded Microsoft's Wallpaper Changer Powertoy, I remember having used it ages ago... It's pretty simple, you just point it to a folder w/pics, select how often you want it to change (every 30m, 1/2/3/4/8/12 hrs, 1/2 days, or every week), and that's it. Position and background color is still controlled by Windows. The only other config option the program offers is to use a specific wallpaper on special days, you just mark a checkbox and put the wallpaper(s) you want for that day in a specific folder it creates (under My Pics/Wallpapers, there's a folder for each day of the month/year).

It seems to use about 13MB of RAM and has stayed there consistently, it only spikes up to 20MB tops when changing wallpapers and CPU usage is minimal when doing that (30% for a sec on my older system, the one still on my sig, w/a crapload of stuff open atm). Good candidate for my netbook.

Now as I mentioned before, John's Background Switcher gives you a lot more customization options... The only downside I can see is that it's a bit more resource heavy, takes up a little under 30MB of RAM and spikes up to 75MB when swapping wallpapers, CPU usage spikes higher than the MS Powertoy as well (all the way to 99% sometimes, for just a second). That being said, you can set it not to switch when you're running a Remote Desktop Session and/or only switch when system has been idle. You also tell it not to switch when running on battery power or when specific programs are running.

It also has multi-monitor support though you have to use the same source/directory of images for both displays, but you can have it display a different wallpaper on each (unlike the MS PowerToy). As I mentioned, your source of wallpapers using JSB can not only be a specific folder but RSS Feeds, Yahoo Image searches or Facebook, Picasa, SmugSmug, and Flickr albums. It can also draw a calendar on your desktop and it has a montage feature to display various images simultaneously, which I didn't try out but it probably works very well with low-res images from Facebook and such... I'm sure some will love that.

You can set a specific order for the pics or have it randomized as well. You can also set it to automatically select the background color based on the colors within the next wallpaper (if it's not full-screen, otherwise it won't be visible obviously). Lastly it gives you a couple more options for scaling/sizing wallpapers than Windows does (which can be set per pic or per folder). Edit: Oh yeah, there's one other noteworthy setting, you can set it to use one picture across both your displays... So if you've made or downloaded several wallpapers that span your two displays (or however many), that's a nice feature to have in orer to randomly swap them.

Haven't seen that on any wallpaper changes outside of programs like DisplayFusion and uhh... Well just DF. You can have UltraMon do it as well but it's via scripts and stuff.
 
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Personally I'm gonna try out the MS Powertoy Wallpaper Changer on my netbook first, if for whatever reason it happens not to swap wallpapers every day (I dunno how it'll handle the fact that the netbook spends most of the time on Hibernate, etc), I'll give John's Background Switcher a try. Other than the extra options to control when/why it changes wallpapers, the only extra stuff in JBS that really draws my attention is the finer scaling/background controls... But all the wallpapers I'm using on the netbook are widescreen 16:10 images, which fit the screen more or less perfectly (it's more like 17:10 but w/e).

If I wasn't using multiple displays on my desktop, or if both displays ran at the same resolution, I'd probably use JBS as my wallpaper switching app there. Though overall functionality is very similar to DisplayFusion. I know a lot of people w/multiple displays here use UltraMon instead of DF to add that secondary display taskbar and other stuff, so JBS might be a good compliment to UM provided you don't want/need to use a different set of images on each display like I do.

I give any of the apps mentioned a good thumbs up, and I did try a couple other random wallpaper changers I spotted on the web but I wasn't sure any of them would positively work w/Vista/7 64-bit (JBS will for sure, MS Powertoy should) and none were as simple/stable as the MS Powertoy or JBS. Hope my mini-evaluation helped someone out. :p
 
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I ended up using the MS Powertoy on my netbook btw, it works just fine 'cept for the fact that it doesn't auto-scale my 16:10 wallpapers to the netbook's slightly wider res (1024x600) so I just re-sized them all manually before dumping them on the netbook. It didn't seem to wanna use the Stretch option within Windows' wallpaper options. It's by far the simplest & 'least resource hungry of all the apps I've tried tho, if you want more features JBS is still pretty good, I just didn't need any of the fluff on the netbook.

The Powertoy changes my wallpaper upon bootup/resume if the timespan specified between changes has been elapsed in between boots. I think you can sort of schedule JBS to actually change the wallpaper at certain times instead of over an interval, and you can prevent it from changing the wallpaper during several specific scenarios, etc.

Still using Display Fusion on my desktop w/dual displays, full Windows 7 compatibility seems to be coming pretty soon according to Jon (the dev) so that's very encouraging... UltraMon development seems to be pretty stagnant.
 
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