Randomly cycle desktop images

Nov 01, '01 03:59:18PM

Contributed by: robg

I know that cycling desktop images been covered here before with a number of solutions, but I just ran across what may be the slickest solution I've seen yet. If you have a number of images that you'd like rotated as your desktop background, check out SwitchPic.

This amazing $5 shareware application, written by Joe Howard, is nearly a perfect solution to the problem. It offers the ability to use the built-in screensaver images (beach, nature, etc) as backgrounds or you can specify your own folder of images. You can then, as seen in the screenshot, individually control whether each image is included in the cycle, how it's placed on the screen, and how likely it is to be chosen for use. You can even choose to install SwitchPic as a stand-alone application or a custom PreferencePane.

About the only caution I would offer is that it does a recursive search on whatever image folder you tell it to use, and if there are a lot of images and sub-folders, your machine can really slow down while it works at cataloging the images. Not a bad bug list for version 1.0 of anything!

So if you want to cycle your desktop images and help a starving college student in the process, download and register (for a whopping $5!) SwitchPic. I'll be registering my version this evening!

[Important note: The program will use a LOT of memory while indexing images! Here's a blurb from the author, posted on VersionTracker: "The problem with the system slowing to a crawl while loading a large set of images doesn't have as much to do with indexing as much as loading all of the pictures to preview. SwitchPic loads an images, resizes to be smaller and then discards the larger image in memory. The problem is that it doesn't release the memory until all of the images have been loaded. When more memory is being taken than you have on the system, it stores it on the slow hard drive. I haven't noticed this since I have a lot of memory so it hasn't needed to access the hard drive. I'll try and fix this and release a updated version early next week."]

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