• Author: Laszlo Szathmary (jabba.laci@gmail.com)
• Date: April, 2011
• Last mod.: June, 2011
• Version: 0.5.0
• Website: https://ubuntuincident.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/wallpaper-downloader-and-rotator-for-gnome/
• GitHub: https://github.com/jabbalaci/Wallpaper-Downloader-and-Rotator-for-Gnome

This free software is copyleft licensed under the same terms as Python, or, at your option, under version 2 of the GPL license.

(The original script was written by reddit user iwakun. See the original_by_iwakun/ folder for more information.)

The goal of the script is to download images from a reddit category and create an XML file that can be set as background in Gnome. The XML file will rotate the images.

Here is the list of changes that I added to the original version:

• New! Large images can be resized to fit your screen resolution. By default, the maximum width of images can be 1920 pixels. You can customize it in the config file. It's recommended, this way the images will occupy much less space on your hard drive.
• New! You can specify several categories and the downloader will grab images from all these sites. The same is true for rotator: you can specify several categories and it will pick a random image from the whole list. See the config file for more details.
• New! The project includes an automatic wallpaper changer script called wallpaper_rotator.py. You don't need any third-party managers anymore.
• You can choose from several reddit categories. You can also specify your favorite category.
• Screen scraping is done with the BeautifulSoup library.
• The most important change is the filtering of images that are unsuitable as wallpapers, i.e. small images, portrait images, and images with strange ratio are removed from the list.
• XML writing is done with the lxml library.
• Support for Flickr images (zioyero's patch).
• The URLs of the downloaded images are strored in an SQLite database. This way an already fetched image (either good or bad) won't be downloaded again.
• The script can set the produced XML as your wallpaper, you don't need to do that manually. Also, XML production can be switched off if you want to use a different wallpaper manager.

For installing lxml, please refer to this entry, where the installation procedure is explained at the end of the post.

First, you might want to customize some settings in the config.py file. The most important thing is the PHOTO_DIR directory, i.e. where to store the downloaded images. Create this directory if it doesn't exist. Then, simply launch the script:

./wallpaper_downloader.py

You can also add it to your crontab:

$ crontab -e
10 */2 * * * /absolute_path_to/wallpaper_downloader.py

Add the second line to the end of the crontab list. Here the script is called at every two hours (at 0h10, 2h10, etc.).

New:

I changed the default behaviour of the script. By default it doesn't generate an XML output. I find it a better solution to use a dedicated wallpaper manager for this task. Rotating the images with an XML is not very flexible, a wallpaper manager can provide a better experience. To this end, I wrote a simple wallpaper rotator that does the job (see the file wallpaper_rotator.py). If you still want the XML, set it in the config file.

There are several ways to manage the downloaded images:

1. The new way is to use wallpaper_rotator.py. Just launch it in the background. It uses the same config file as the wallpaper downloader.
2. The old way is to generate an XML and set it as your wallpaper. The downloader can do all that; for customizations see the config file.

• Nathan B, alias ndbroadbent
• Adrian Castillejos, alias zioyero

Maybe I should remove the XML generator part from the downloader. After all, it's "just" a downloader, so it should do just one thing. Since I made a wallpaper changer, I don't use the XML any more. The new rotator script is preferred over the XML, thus XML is sort of deprecated.

1. Add support to more wallpaper sites: http://wallbase.cc, http://4walled.org/.

2. Add support to other operating systems: Windows, Mac.