This is a revision of an 8 year old hint - listed here - on how to update the desktop picture from a downloaded image.
Things have moved on a bit from 2002, but since at least one person is still interested in this hint, here's a revised version for 10.5.x and 10.6.x.
There are three changes:
set pictureURL to "http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/barrel_cropped_(1).jpg" set localFile to POSIX path of (path to home folder from user domain) & "DTPic.jpg" set cmd to "curl " & quoted form of pictureURL & " > " & quoted form of localFile do shell script cmd tell application "System Events" tell desktop 1 set picture rotation to 1 set picture rotation to "never" set picture to POSIX file localFile end tell end tell
tell application "Image Events"
set theImage to open localFile
scale theImage to size 1200 -- adjusts the longest edge (assumedly the bottom edge) to a reasonable size
pad theImage to dimensions {1440, 900} -- pads the image with black to the size of the screen to prevent distortion
save theImage
end tellMac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100817143748402