I’ve looked at a large number of free wallpaper cyclers for Windows out there and they’ve all had one flaw. I’ve never seen a program that simply runs, cycles your wallpaper and then quits. They all insist on hanging around in your taskbar. Tiny Wallpaper Changer is different. My philosophy is simple: keep the program that runs on startup that actually cycles your wallpaper as fast as possible and write a separate program to do pretty stuff like select a file rotation and adjust settings. My life isn’t so boring that I need a new wallpaper every X hours – once per boot is enough for me.

Instructions

The program is in two parts. Firstly, run TinyWallpaperChanger.exe
Use the file menu to set the Wallpaper Directory. This will probably be the My Pictures folder. When you click on ‘Open’ the folder you have selected and all folders inside of it will be scanned for pictures.

When the list is displayed you can manually delete pictures by clicking on them to select them (shift click will allow you to select multiple items and ctrl-click to select many individual items) and press the delete key or use the file menu to remove the items.

If you can’t wait until your next reboot to change your wallpaper simply double-click on a image in the list and it will be set as your wallpaper straight away.

When you are finished use the file menu to save the wallpaper list.

Exit the program and double-click on twc.exe. Hopefully your wallpaper will change! If you want your wallpaper to change on startup simply place a shortcut to twc.exe in the Startup folder in your start menu. You can also place a shortcut to twc.exe anywhere else you find handy.

You can use the menu to check for updates if you wish. Otherwise, you will get a reminder to check every week (assuming you actually run it then).

What’s new in this version (v0.5 – 28/1/07)?
* Added full PNG support
* Added limited BMP support (no thumbnails)

What was new in the old versions?

v0.4 – 12/12/07
* Double-clicking on an individual wallpaper will instantly set that picture as your desktop.

v0.3 – 10/12/07
* Fixed a bug that caused the old wallpaper to disappear upon login (and replaced with a blank blue screen in XP) and the wallpaper to disappear altogether in Vista.

v0.2 – 6/12/07
* Thumbnail previews (can toggle via the View menu or using ctrl-p)
* Previews show basic information about the file
* Fixed a bug where files would not be recognised if their extension was in all capitals

0.1 – 5/12/07
* Everything(!)

Download

twc.zip v0.5 (410 kB) (Windows-only. Java 5.0 or better required.)
Extract the zip and place the Tiny Wallpaper Changer folder somewhere useful (e.g. your Program Files directory)

License

Tiny Wallpaper Changer is released under the GNU GPL License v2. See the license.txt and credits.txt file inside the twc.zip file for more information.

Contact

This is a very rough go at what I eventually want the program to look like. Feel free to email me via catchwa [at] gmail [dot] com and shoot me a message, or leave a comment on this page.