Huddled Masses
August 4th, 2004 | 
Author: I just upgraded my favorite image viewer to IrfanView 3.91, and it came to my attention that since 3.90, Irfanview now has a command-line option to set an image as wallpaper. Since Irfanview can tile or resize the image, as well as automatically converting from any format to bitmap … it seems obvious that since you should already have IrfanView installed (seeing as it’s the fastest image viewer out there for Windows), the best choice for setting wallpapers is to use that.
So, here’s a little script to randomly pick a file and have IrfanView set it as wallpaper. Throw the script into your Scheduled tasks, or your startup folder … and you’re all set [;)]
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(WallpaperFolder)
set files = objFolder.Items
randomize
command = """C:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe"" """ & files.Item(cint((files.Count - 1) * Rnd)).Path & """ /wall=0 /killmesoftly"
set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run command, 0, true
Seems like that should do it. Of course, that assumes you have nothing but images in that folder. If you wanted to select only .jpg files from a folder that had other things in it, you could do something like:
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(WallpaperFolder)
set files = objFolder.Items
i = cint((files.Count - 1) * Rnd)
while lcase(right(files.Item(i).name,3)) <> "jpg"
i = cint((files.Count - 1) * rnd)
wend
command = """C:\Program Files\IrfanView\i_view32.exe"" """ & files.Item(i).Path & """ /wall=0 /killmesoftly"
set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run command, 0, true
As a simple note, you can change the /wall=0 to 1 or 2 if you wish:
/wall=0set it as wallpaper (centered)/wall=1set it as wallpaper (tiled)
/wall=2set it as wallpaper (stretched)
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Comment spamming dirty scoundrel. Go away.
Have you tried XNView? (http://www.xnview.com/)
It’s my favourite viewer/converter
Yeah … I have that too. Honestly, I can barely tell the difference, in terms of functionality. Irfanview’s got better integration into Windows, so they win me over [:)]
Joel,
Thanks for the script. FYI, version 3.92 is now out, and so are the 3.92 plugins!
Oh, I forgot…because I’m not much of a programmer, how would I save this script? Would I save it as, say, wallpaper.cmd or .exe or something?
Damn cool, thanks
It’s a .vbs script
Im trying to view this page in both IE 6 and Firefox 1.5 and the code is full of HTML tags. Anyone else? I would like to use this script as a scheduled task.
Thanks!
Yep, Sorry. I fixed the post now … Apparently I was having issues with Geshi and Textile again … they don’t get along very well.
I’m unable to get that script working. When I try to run it, I get error messages about illegal characters. It seems that the blog software messes up with the script changing quote chars to different characters and minus sign to dash etc. Since I don’t know anything about vbs formatting, I was unable to parse the line where the actual command is constructed.