Get Automatic Desktop Wallpapers From Facebook And Other Photo Sites

Getting an attractive and fresh desktop background is an idea loved by many. The actively changing wallpapers feature in Windows 7 does give you some eye candy, but the same pictures pop up over and over.

The changing wallpaper would be made even better by getting automatic updates from the Internet that would keep giving you new pictures from places like Bing, Google or even Facebook.

John’s Background Switcher (JBS, as the site calls it) is an amazing (and free) software that says no to boring desktop backgrounds. It automatically changes the background image on your desktop in time intervals that you specify. Although there are loads of other software available for such a task, the variety and ease of JBS is what makes it worth talking about.

Overview

To begin with, let us talk about the host of options that JBS provides for fetching the wallpapers.

• The location could be all or some of  the wallpapers from your computer, or a few selected ones from specific folders.
• Photo sharing sites such as Flickr , Phanfare or Smugmug are supported. In fact, you can even pick up details for the photos to be chosen such as a period of time, a specific person or everybody, group photo pool, from a particular album, or just your own uploaded photos.
• Options like Picasa Web Album and Webshots collections are also present, and you can key in a particular keyword or album name for the photos to be chosen from. For pictures from private albums, the private album URL will be required.
• You are free to add any RSS feed, such as from photo websites like Photobucket , DevianArtor Zoomr. Once you enter a URL, check if it’s correct using the test button.
• If all the above options are not enough, then you might consider adding a search term to look for pictures in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Apart from the search keyword, other details such as picture size, color and adult filtering can also be set.
• Lastly, you can authorize JBS with your Facebook account to choose the photos. The photos can be chosen from all your friends’ photos, selected friends/albums, photos that contain you, or any random photo.

Once you are done selecting the picture source, change the switching time and the picture mode to your desired one. Impressive picture modes such as scale to full screen, thumbnail mosaic, four picture montage, Polaroid pile and others are available. If you have multiple monitors, you can opt for different pictures in each of them.

For those who still feel incomplete, click on the “More” option to get an advanced list of settings such as start up option, shortcuts, ignored pictures, no draw zones and many more.

Conclusion

All in all, John’s Background Switcher is a very impressive software, and it’s free pricing makes it even better. The installer is less than 2 MB in size and can be installed on all 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows from Windows 98 onwards.

Download the installer here.