John’s Background Switcher
I can’t stand plain, boring backgrounds. John’s Background Switcher (or JBS for short) periodically changes the background image on your computer (like every hour or every day) to something interesting. You can specify which pictures to choose from:
- Individual pictures on your computer.
- Folders containing pictures on your computer such as ‘My Pictures’.
- Flickr photo sharing - selecting pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random. You never know what you’re going to get next!
- Phanfare web albums - keep up to date with your friends and family.
- smugmug photo galleries - yours, your friends, anybody’s!
- Picasa Web Albums - choose from specific albums or any search text.
- Facebook - your friends photos on your desktop!
- Yahoo! image search - the internet is your oyster!
- Any Media RSS feed - choose pictures from sites like DeviantArt, Photobucket, LOLCats and Zooomr amongst many others!
Don’t want to read any more? Download the installer! (Version 3.6 - 1.48MB)
What Does It Do?
JBS sits in your system tray (down by the clock) and changes your background at the time interval of your choosing. You tell it where to get pictures from and how to show them - maybe you just want to see one photo at a time or maybe you’d like to see a ‘Snapshot Scrapbook‘ of photos thrown across your desktop. It’s up to you and you never know what’s coming next!
What Does It Look Like?
The settings dialog that controls all the functionality of JBS looks like this:
You pick where you want to choose photos from using the buttons on the left, then specify the search criteria for the given mode. Additional fine-tuning options are available from the ‘More Settings’ dialog where you can tweak till you heart’s content. Maybe you want a 3-month calendar on your desktop or your backgrounds always to be sepia - whatever you want is probably there. If it’s not, tell me and I’ll put it there!
How Do I Bring Up The Settings?
The tray icon (pictured right) lets you open the settings, pause switching, view all downloaded photos (especially useful if you’re using one of the montage modes - just choose ‘Picture Browser’), email or save backgrounds, check for updates and exit JBS (nooooooo!). Full documentation is included explaining every feature, checkbox and menu item. If you don’t like JBS (I hope you’ll tell me why) the uninstaller will remove every trace of it from your computer - it won’t leave even so much as a temporary file on your system! 
Download Now - It’s Free!
Did I mention that JBS is completely free? Well it is! It will work happily on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista (both 32 and 64-bit version). It uses Microsoft.NET 2.0 and if that’s not already installed on your computer the setup wizard will download and install it for you. If you have a version of JBS installed already just run the installer below and it’ll upgrade your settings for you - there’s no need to uninstall the current version first!
Download the Installer (Version 3.6 - 1.48MB)
Here are the full release notes from my knowledgebase:
You can subscribe to the knowledgebase RSS feed here to keep up to date with all the latest JBS developments and news.
Donate
If you’d like to support the development of John’s Background Switcher then please feel free to send me a donation using the button below so I can buy some coffee to stay up late and crank out more features!
Support
If you find any problems or have any requests, then please:
I sincerely hope you enjoy John’s Background Switcher. I love working on it and use it myself all the time! No more plain, boring backgrounds! 
