A fast and simple way to set a desktop background image

May 22, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: cycomachead

This hint combines two common documented tools into a time-saving trick. It requires is that you have a picture for your desktop. To use that image as your desktop picture:

  1. Open the picture in Safari. This is likely not a default image viewer, so Control-click on the image and use the Open With menu. As long as it's a common format -- JPEG, TIFF, PNG, etc -- Safari should automatically appear. You can also drag the image onto Safari's icon in the Dock, which is even simpler.
  2. In Safari, Control-click on the image and select Use Image as Desktop Picture.
VoilĂ ! That's it; this is so much faster than manually adding a photo through the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel.

[robg adds: While this is indeed a quick way to set a single image as a desktop background, it doesn't actually add the image to an existing collection; it merely sets the selected image as the desktop background. If you want to add the picture to a rotating set of images, you'll have to do it yourself. I do this by specifying my own folder of images to use for desktop images, then just adding pictures to that folder.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090521235108562