iRadar: 8 Simple Ways To Use Flickr For Your Wallpaper Downloads

Saturday, November 27, 2010

8 Simple Ways To Use Flickr For Your Wallpaper Downloads

8 Simple Ways To Use Flickr For Your Wallpaper Downloads: "

flickr wallpaper I am bit of a wallpaper freak. I change them as often as I change clothes. For me and I believe for many of us in the human pool, wallpapers also reflect our daily moods. Down in the dumps; put up a motivational poster on the desktop and the inner spirit goes up a small notch.

For a guy who flips his way through wallpapers, the web and the numerous wallpaper resources are like an Aladdin’s cave. Our previous wallpaper posts are bit of a trail-marker towards it. Then there was Tina’s excellent post on The Best Resources To Pimp Your Wallpaper.

Flickr happens to be the world’s largest photo sharing community. So, you can expect to find a few cool and great wallpapers among its small collection of 5 billion images.

Leaving the other great sites alone, it’s fun to make Flickr your image playground. When it comes to wallpapers also, Flickr gives you lots to download and cover your desktop with. So, let’s check out some of the ways we can get to those neat Flickr wallpapers.

Flickr’s Wallpaper Group

flickr wallpaper

With 7,513 members contributing nearly 58,000 uploads with a minimum resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels (with a preference for 1,600 by 1,200 pixels), you can browse and select to your heart’s content. You can post your own too on this public Flickr group.

Use the search box to explore the pool. I find using the Group Tags more convenient. Then there’s the Flickr Slideshow view also.

Flickr’s Wallpaper and Backgrounds

A lesser number (4,377) of users but nearly 28,000 wallpaper images is still a grand collection. This group follows a minimum standard of 1,280 x 1,024 pixels for its wallpapers and backgrounds. Unlike the previous group, this one only accepts photos (no screencasts and videos). Users can contribute one a day as against five per day for the previous group.

Flickr’s iPhone Wallpapers

Flickr sees a lot of iPhone users. This group of nearly 6,000 members sees to it that you get to use 28,000 iPhone wallpapers. The group accepts video and animation uploads too.

Wallpapers Corner

The site is a simple search engine for Flickr images. You get a menu on the side which offers you a series of filter choices to get the right Flickr wallpaper of your choice. Use a keyword and then distill the results down with the filters (for instance, for your screen resolution). You have to click another link that takes you to the image page on Flickr.

Wallpapr

A simple Brazilian search engine built on Ajax for Flickr desktop wallpaper images. It neatly asks you how many wallpapers you want (set it for 20, 40 or 100 photos) for your specific search query and then it goes about collecting them from Flickr. Now, there’s an iPhone and iPod Touch version too.

Fleace

Fleace stands for – the Flickr-Enabled Automatic Changer for Everyone. It is a simple free wallpaper changer that calls up pictures from Flickr depending on the tags you choose. The 312KB free wallpaper changer runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista. You can run it straight from the downloaded EXE file or install it and run on startup. The app downloads random wallpapers one at a time, gives you a preview and automatically changes it on the desktop. Then it goes to sleep so it does not hog memory.

You can choose not to install the shown wallpaper and instead go for the next one that Fleace brings up. You can apply a few more settings like wallpaper position and size in the Options tab.

Wallpaper Flickr

The free software for retrieving Flickr wallpapers is a bit dated but at 50KB download size, it does its job pretty well. The developer’s site doesn’t list the software, so I went into CNET’s Download.com to get it. The free wallpaper rotator works on Windows XP and Vista and its functionality is pretty much as you can see in the screenshot. You can set it to automatically rotate your desktop wallpaper after every few seconds. You need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed though.

Flickr Wallpaper

flickr wallpaper

We go even tinier and simpler with this 8KB little app that’s compiled in C#. You have to install Microsoft .Net Framework version 1.1 at least to run this. This little program downloads a random, interesting photo from Flickr, and changes your desktop wallpaper. You can schedule it to run automatically using Scheduled Tasks on Windows. You can download specific wallpapers by changing the tags in the shortcut file that’s provided. The simple to understand instructions are given in the Readme.txt file.

Even a simple Google Image Search can filter out larger resolution Flickr images that you can use as desktop wallpapers. The thing about Flickr is that there’s an incredible variety of images that can be positioned as wallpapers. So, can I find you on Flickr downloading wallpapers to deck up your desktop?

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