Automatically download and shuffle Flickr wallpaper images with Flickr Wallpaper Rotator

Automatically download and shuffle Flickr wallpaper images with Flickr Wallpaper Rotator:

What if I told you that you could install an app that gave you unlimited, beautiful, images downloaded and shuffled on your desktop automatically, and that all you had to do was enjoy and, on occasion, skip an image that perhaps didn’t quite strike your fancy?

That program in question is free and it is called Flickr Wallpaper Rotator. It works remarkably well to display some really remarkable, high quality wallpaper images. Some are duds, of course, and some don’t really work as wallpaper as such; but approximately half, in my experience, are simply terrific. See some examples above of wallpapers that it downloaded that I really liked.

How it works: Flickr Wallpaper Rotator runs in the background, and automatically changes your wallpaper after a certain time period has lapsed. It is set by default to grab “Interesting photos updated recently”, which produces excellent results (see above), but if you like you can enter tags of topics that it should look for in the setting. Alternately, you can set it to grab the favorite images as set by a specific Flickr user (or your own Flickr username, if you like).

You could also set the time interval for rotation, and whether you want images stretched/centered/tiled.

What I like about this software

• Surprisingly good results: exceeded my expectations, which to be honest were initially quite low
• All images are stored locally: enabling you to go in there and pull out ones you want to keep permanently. On Windows 7 I found them in “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\WallpaperFlickr\wallpaper”. You might want to go in there and clean up after using for some time, removing unwanted images.
• Exposes you to new types of images: that you typically think about downloading and using as wallpaper.
• Image sizes are appropriate: all images downloaded were quite large in terms of resolution. I expected it to be resizing small images to my quite large screen, but that was not the case.

The verdict: I really like this; works really well. Of course, you will get the occasional crappy wallpaper (or several in a row), but some really terrific images as well. Highly recommended.

For other wallpaper resources check out our wallpaper category page.

Version Tested: 1.3

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires MS .NET Framework 2.0 or higher (most PCs will already have this).

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 442K).