Picture Switcher lets you change desktop pictures and other preferences easily
Originally downloaded 4/6/06. Here’s a fun little bit of freeware… If you’ve got room left in your menubar (and you may not these days!), Picture Switcher puts a menu enabling most of the features of the desktop pictures preference pane right there. I’ll try it for awhile to see if I use it enough to make the menubar real estate worthwhile.
Update 9/29/06. OK, I’ll admit I’m enough of a desktop mods freak to feel the need for making this little item a permanent fixture in my toolbar. For awhile, I had been using (and actually paid for—big mistake!) a software package called DeskShade—which gives you more control over your desktop pictures than Apple’s built-in Desktop Preferences pane does. (The great news is that Leopard greatly expands what Desktop Prefs can do.) However, where DeskShade cost me $12.99, Picture Switcher is free!
PictureSwitcher lets you add whatever folders you like to your desktop picture collection. It gives you the same controls for how those pictures are displayed (tiled, centered, stretched, etc), but a great deal more control over how often they change. In fact, through a “custom” setting, you can make this whatever you like (in seconds). So if you like running slide shows on your desktop, this is the cat’s meow!
A recent addition is the View pictures window, which lets you preview all the pics in each of the folders you’ve designated to use with Picture Switcher. This is a very handy utility, with nice, large preview icons. I had some trouble, though, when trying to load a folder with over 1,000 images… Picture Switcher doesn’t cache the preview icons, and it would sometimes stop generating the previews before it was finished scanning the folder.
Another nice touch is PictureSwitcher’s tie-in to iPhoto… you can opt to see all your iPhoto albums in the software’s menubar item. Only problem here is that you can’t use these albums as slide shows… only as static background images. For slide shows, you have to set those up in iPhoto. Of course, you can have PictureSwitcher browse the folders with iPhoto source images, and have it cycle through those. But then it doesn’t get any crops or other enhancements you’ve made, and it doesn’t skip the photos you didn’t think were good enough to include in your finished albums.
As I mentioned previously, Leopard makes some of Picture Switcher’s functionality redundant, since it lets you add as many picture albums as you want and gives you very nice previews–though smaller than Picture Switcher’s, they draw faster and work on even the largest folders. Still, this wonderful freeware will probably retain a place in Leopard since it makes changing my desktop picture preferences so convenient!
Version as tested: 1.1.2.
