John’s Background Switcher : Automatically Switch Windows Desktop Background

A great desktop wallpaper not only makes your computer look good, but also sets you in a great mood when you start to work on your PC. If you have a bunch of images that you want to set as your desktop wallpaper but cannot decide which one to pick because they are all so stunning, then you can use the free John’s Background Switcher to automatically switch your desktop background after a preset time period. This way you have all your favorite images set as your Windows desktop background one after another.

John’s Background Switcher is a Windows application that periodically changes the background image on your computer (like every hour or every day) to something interesting. You can specify images from a location on your hard disk or from various online services like Dropbox, VladStudio, 500px, Instagram, Google Images, Bing Images, Facebook, Phanfree, Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug and more.

John's Background Switcher

You can download it from its its author – John Connor’s website. It is designed using Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, so you should have .NET 2.0 Framework installed in Windows. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, then you already have .NET 2.0 installed on your system. If you are using Windows XP or Windows 8, then you should install .NET 3.5SP1 before using this program. The download is available in form of an installer. During the installation on Windows XP and Windows 8, it would try to download .NET 2.0 if you do not already have it installed. After the installation, John’s Background Switcher (or JBS in short) shows up a settings window. If this settings window does not show up, then you can open the settings from its notification area icon. In the JBS settings you can specifiy where to pick images from. You can specify more than one sources. Just click on the Add button and choose a source and follow on-screen instrcutions to add the pictures as shown.

Johns Background Switcher

If you do not know what to add, then just click on the Create some default sets button to automatically add some online picture source sets. You can also specify the time period after which you want the desktop background to switch. You can pick this time period from 10 seconds to 7 days. You can also specify different styles of desktop background – scale, stretch, centre or crop the picture; generate a thumbnail mosaic, four picture montage, postcard pile or polaroid pile from the available images. If you have multiple monitors, then you can also choose if you want to show different backgrounds on each of them.

If you want more from JBS then you can click on the More button in the settings window. This would open an advanced settings window. Here you can choose from a plethora of options. In the General section, you can choose JBS to auto-start with Windows, display calendar on background, enable shortcuts etc. In the Montages section, you can choose the size and other settings for thumbnail mosaic, snapshot scrapbook, polaroid pile and postcards pile. You can also find settings for picture handling, picture sources and web connections. Under the No Draw Zones section, you can specify where the background should not be drawn. In the Import/Export section, you can export or import your JBS settings or reset them.

Johns Background Switcher

The pictures downloaded from the internet sources are so beautiful, that you do not want to wait for the next image. If you cannot wait for the next image, or just dont like the current image as you desktop background, then you can manually switch to the next image. Just right-click on the notification area icon for JBS and select Next Background from the context menu. Using the same context menu, you can choose to display previous background, save the picture, clear the background and post the current image to your twitter account or e-mail it to your friend.

Johns Background Switcher

So if you are tired of staring at the boring desktop background sticking to your Windows PC, then you can bring some cool dynamic desktop backgrounds to your Windows using Johns Background Switcher. It is a free tool and does a magnificent job of switching the desktop backgrounds.

You can download Johns Background Switcher from http://johnsadventures.com/software/backgroundswitcher/.