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iPhoto4 smart albums break desktop picture switching Apps
In older versions of iPhoto, I kept a folder called Favorites with all of my favorite pictures in it. When I updated to iPhoto4, I rated all of my favorite photos and created a Smart Album called Favorites. Today I noticed that my favorite pictures are no longer set to my desktop background, so I went to System Preferences, clicked on "Desktop & Screen Saver," and clicked on the Favorites iPhoto album.

I noticed, however, that the option to change the picture every XX minutes is grayed out. Although I could pick a single picture from that folder for my background, I was not able to select the entire album like I could with older versions of iPhoto.

I did some checking and found that this only effects smart albums. So if you use iPhoto to create albums of desktop images, like I do, you may want to keep a regular album around for that purpose.

[robg adds: I hope this bug gets fixed in a future system/iPhoto update, as I was also counting on smart albums to create a "live updating" folder of my current favorite images.]
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iPhoto4 smart albums break desktop picture switching
Authored by: hderycke on Feb 11, '04 04:17:29PM

Far as I know, this is the same as in iPhoto3. The 'last import' album is unavailble for auto-picture-changing.

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E pur si muove



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iPhoto4 smart albums break desktop picture switching
Authored by: meall on Feb 11, '04 08:21:47PM

Maybe Apple is not able to do it because of the dynamic changing nature of smart album, witch are not the case with standard album.



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iPhoto4 smart albums break desktop picture switching
Authored by: TALlama on Aug 19, '04 11:57:33AM

This script will choose a random image from the given album and set it as the desktop picture.


#/bin/sh

ALBUM="Backgrounds"

/usr/bin/osascript <<END
    tell application "iPhoto"
        set p_max to the number of photos in album named "$ALBUM"
        set p_num to random number from 1 to p_max
        set the_bg to the image path of photo p_num of album named "$ALBUM"
    end tell
    tell application "Finder"
        -- display dialog "Foo"
        -- set the_bg to ""
        -- display dialog the_bg
        set bg_file to the_bg as POSIX file
        set the desktop picture to bg_file as file
    end tell
END

I have it running in cron as so:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /Users/tal/Pictures/rotator.sh

This makes my desktop rotate every ten minutes to any picture in my "Backgrounds" smart album. Enjoy!



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