I'd rather not have 1 long line of text... it just looks ugly. It would be very nice if I could setup a box to render the text in... so it stays neat & clean... or define a max width (for a word-wrap)... to keep everything in the appropriate corner...

Ah don't worry about it - the fact that you're enjoying using JBS is thanks enough! :)

hello everyone,

that software's awesome ! i like so much. But i wanna ask something.

i wanna get datas from that web page's rss datas.

the page is : http://www.thepaperwall.com
rss page is : http://www.thepaperwall.com/wall_rss.php

thank you for helping.

I tried to make a small donation today but failed because of Paypal. Might be because Paypal still has not implemented the "Verified By Visa" secure transcation system:

http://www.visaeurope.com/en/businesses__retailers/retailers_and_merchants/security/handling_visa_payments/card-not-present_sales/verified_by_visa.aspx

Most banks in my country requires that for foreign transactions.

I will retry it within a year.

Regards

MrK

Ah cool, glad you got it working the way you wanted! :)

You're most welcome and there is a donation button near the bottom of the download page:

http://johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher/

Great advice! I have tried it and I can confirm it works. On my wife's computer (5 year old Laptop, Core2Duo T7100, 300Gb@7200rpm) we have around 5000 pictures and I choose 50000 as setting (will take a while to reach that amount thou :-) ). I do not think we can notice any performance penalty.

Thank you very much for your help!

And I must not forget to mention that I think the program is fantastic especially beeing freeware! And getting support for freeware is even more amazing :-D

Regards
MrK and family

P.s.
Do you have a donate button somewhere?

Something that always confuses people is that a Flickr user name is not always what you expect it to be. So that person's user name is in fact '82463854@N00' - so if you choose photos from a specific person and put that user name in, then you'll be able to pick from their photos.

Feedburner will often return a MediaRSS feed (which JBS supports) when it realises that there photos attached to a site, however it doesn't always work and often will actually return an invalid feed which is why JBS will sometimes complain. Anyway, you should be able to choose from their Flickr photos now. Hope that helps!

You can actually do this already, it's just maybe not that obvious.

Add a Flickr picture set and choose from 'My Flickr photos', make sure you're authorised, then 'Choose from' 'My favourites' and it'll pick from all the photos you've favourited. Hope that helps!

Thanks John,

Here is my lazy mans cut at it. It only pulls pics hosted at imgur.com but it works fine.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=b74d518a2b26b458d4dcd3f2ffc044e6

Just wondering if it might be possible to someday be able to display the photo's that we save in our Flickr page as "favorites". (not my photos...but the ones that I mark as favorites from other users and that are then saved so when I click on Favorites, they all come up to be viewed ) Thank You....

Hi,

Thank you for JBS, it's been working wonders for years now for me.

Today I wanted to add images from a website: http://www.deadendthrills.com They have a feedburner rss feed, and while I do see some images in the posts, JBS doesn't spot them.

I also tried a Flickr approach to this but JBS couldn't find
http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncanjharris/

I can only assume it has something to do with http://johnsadventures.com/forum/topic.php?id=260#post-923

Can you please let me know is there something I can do to get these images added to JBS?

Thank you

Oops, thought I'd replied to you but must have closed the tab before posting!

I've created a few Yahoo! Pipes that JBS happily supports so if you look at this one, for example (which reformats the Bing homepage background feed), you'll see I've populated the values JBS needs:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ae2b61bf4084ccff3458e21d4f728566

Make a copy of it and you'll see what's what. If you need a hand let me know and if you get it working also let me know so I can share it around!

Ok, so if JBS finds more than 1000 pictures in the folder(s) you selected it'll cache the picture list in those folders for the period of time specified in 'More Settings'. This is just to speed things up as if you have, say 100,000 pictures in 10,000 sub-folders it can slow down switching while JBS scans every single folder.

Now in your case you may not notice it so you can change that 1000 threshold to be a much higher number. This will stop JBS from caching the pictures at all and will check on every switch. Go to the 'Import / Export' section of 'More Settings' and export your settings. Edit the file in NotePad and look for this line:

<watch_cache_folder_picture_count_threshold>1000</watch_cache_folder_picture_count_threshold>

Change that 1000 to a much higher number like 100000, save the file and re-import it into JBS. OK all the dialogs and you should be good to go! Let me know how you get on.

Ok, so this is as I suspected a case of JBS not scaling down the text size on a full screen. I'll add that to the list. Although you could try using a smaller font size as defined in 'More Settings'. Although that is a particularly long image title for sure!

Today (i.e. more than 2hours after adding pics) I have started to get newly added pictures.

Is there a way to reset JBS after adding pictures so you do not have to wait until next day? (of course it is still an improvement that I get new pics at all :-) )

Regards

MrK

Screenshot is winging its way to you.

Thank you for your answer!
Sorry that I missed the difference between the two different "adding models".

I have now removed the "Pictures on your computer" and changed it to "A folder on your computer".
I cannot really tell if it works yet, it still seams to be some more setting that is affecting the choosen pictures. I started with around 1300pics, added 250pics and then clicked through around 300-400 pics. I did not get any of the newly added pics.

I see there is a setting about "cache picture lists" which seam to be default set at 2hour? Does that mean it takes 2hours before JBS detects new pictures? Can I reset that?
The pictures are mixed with movies (AVI and 3gp), does that in any way invalidate the rest of the subfolder totally?

Regards

MrK

I understand.

I'll keep an eye out for whenever you get a chance to make the update.

Interestingly JBS used to allow specific intervals, like 17 minutes for example. However to simplify the UI and make it more usable I changed to use the same approach as Windows Vista / 7 to have a drop-down list with the most popular intervals.

On Vista / Windows 7 the minimum switch interval is indeed 10 seconds and the problem with lowering the limit is that to cancel switching you'd have an ever smaller window where JBS is in its 'ready' state to pause it or bring up the settings.

So if you have JBS switching and it takes 10 seconds to download a bunch of Flickr photos to generate a montage and you want to change the settings you'd have to hit 'Cancel' from the tray menu then, when the cancel actually occurred (which won't always be immediate) then you'll only have that interval, say 3 seconds in your example, to bring up the settings or it'll switch again and you're in the same loop. It's not very usable so I'd need to change JBS to allow you to bring up the settings while it's switching. This is indeed on my todo list as you might expect. The point is just lowering the limit isn't as simple as it might appear as I don't want to make JBS suck in other ways!

Ah, are you using the postcard mode, polaroids or is it the caption on a single desktop? The first two should scale down the text to fit but the third, admittedly doesn't and should do! Any chance you could post or send me a screenshot?

Ah, so what you've done is gone Add > 'Pictures on your computer' which lets you define a specific list of pictures to use for your desktop. That list (or lists) of pictures won't change unless you add or remove some more pictures from it.

What you need to do is go Add > 'A folder on your computer' as I mentioned above which will let you choose a folder, such as 'My Pictures' and it'll scan the folder and pick up any changes in pictures.

So delete your picture set, then go Add > 'A folder on your computer' and you'll be all good!

I am really sorry but it does not.
1.a) The screen "Picture sets" with sub-part "Pictures on your computer" has a picture count. This picture count does not update when adding a new folder and downloading pictures from a digital camera using the built in Windows function.
1.b) Restarting JBS does not update the picture count.
2. Usually it takes a while to find out but the pictures really never shows up.
3. Removeing and readding the "My pictues" folders updates the picture count and also shows the picture (I have it on 15min autoswitch but sometimes I switch them manually).

Could it be something with UAC and Windows 7 x64? Maybe it works on 32bit Win XP?

Regards

MrK

So if you went Add > A folder on my computer, then JBS will automatically scan that folder and all subdirectories for pictures when it looks for ones to use. So there's no need for you to remove and re-add the folder, JBS will detect any new pictures you add automatically!

Hello,

Is there a way to make the JBS periodically update the selection on local folder?
I mean: I have selected the "My pictures" folder of the local computer: but now and then I download pictures from my camera as a subfolder in "My pictures". The only way I know of now is to remove the "My puctures" folder and then re-add it again. Otherwise the pictures do not show.

Regards

MrK

Over on DonationCoder, we've been having a discussion about the best Win7-compatible freeware background changer and JBS came up.

I think JBS is great, but I need the option to change images every 3 seconds or even every 5 seconds, but 10 seconds - the current minimum - is too long.

Have you thought of changing the way time intervals are chosen so that instead of a dropdown, people can choose any interval they'd like?

Jacob

I finally got around to turning on the photo-descriptions... and noticed that on some of my sources... the description is not a 2-3 word description. Unfortunately... it runs off the screen to the left, and so I am only able to read the last sentence. Is there any way to wrap the text? or set a bounding-box to wrap the text in a pre-defined box?

Hi Dimitry! That's an interesting idea. For a long time I've been meaning to get around to implementing screensaver functionality for JBS which would be used here. Since a screensaver is just a full screen window I could solve both problems with that. I'll see what I can do!

I have found your program today and I am excited. I particularly enjoy the background colors it generates if the format of the foto is different from the format of the monitor. It is almost perfect for looking and enjoying of the beatiful fotos which it can get from different sources.

The only annoyance for me is that it can be used only for setting a background image. Even if I hide the task bar there are still some desktop icons which pollute the nicest pictures. Therefore I would like to ask you to add a mode where the program just displays the slide show on a full screen instead of manipulating the wall paper.

Do you think you could do it?

Kind regards, Dimitry Polivaev

Ach, it's not a big piece of work and I'm only one opinion of many! Different colours and potentially patterns might be an interesting addition too. Will have a play around and see what I can come up with. Thanks again for the suggestions!

Interesting indeed, maybe it wouldnt look right. Perhaps it might be OK with colour background and b/w images? Don't waste your time if you think its not worth it ;-)

That's interesting as when I first built the implementation I did try different thicknesses and what not and if I removed the border it just didn't look right. Likewise too thick also didn't work too well. That said I'll have a look at adding a configuration option to let you change the thickness yourself in a future version as you may see things differently to me!

Turn them on/off, change border thickness, colour. On and off would do me though :)

Hi John,

thank you very much for your reply. :-)

With best regards
Farbmond

So in the current version there's no way to specify multi-monitor modes on a source or picture set basis. However it is on my todo list for the next major version of JBS. Unfortunately it's somewhat trickier than it might appear from the outside - but I won't bore you with the details, that's a challenge for me to sort out! :)

I REALLY need to implement a screensaver for JBS. It was first suggested an embarrassing number of years ago. I'll take this as a gentle reminder to get it done!