How to: Use an iPhoto photocast subscription as your desktop background

Here’s the quick how-to:

1. Subscribe to a photocast in iPhoto ‘06. Note the name of the Album that is created for the photocast in the album list on the left.

2. Open the Desktop & Screen Saver system prefs, and on the Desktop tab, click “Choose Folder…” in the list on the left.

3. Navigate to the album’s folder:

   ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Data/year/PhotocastAlbumName
   
   

   and select it.

   Note: year is the current year, and PhotocastAlbumName is the name of the photocast album created in step 1.

4. The photos in the photocast should appear in the photo grid on the right .

5. You can pick a photo, or, as I did, click “Change Picture” at the bottom to have it cycle through photos in the photocast.

I’ve found a few minor caveats so far:

• If you do this with a flickr feed, the size of the images is fairly small, so you’ll probably want to set the desktop to “Fill screen” or “Stretch to fill screen”.

• I have no idea how well this technique will pick up on new photos as they appear in the photocast. Only time will tell.

Enjoy! Can you believe that bonsai trees led to this discovery? No?, well here’s the backstory and some info on other things I tried that didn’t work …

Over the past few years, I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to grow a bonsai, and this year, I decided, is the year. So, I’ve been doing my usual overly obsessive amount of reading up on the subject, and looking for inspiration in trees in our area, as well as on flickr and other sites.

I wanted to find a way to have bonsai inspiration in front of me throughout the day at work, in the hopes that visual osmosis would kick in, and I would have a head start by the time I make it to the local nursery to pick out a tree. I knew there had to be some combination of iPhoto or NetNewsWire, RSS/Atom, and maybe some freeware, or a simple Ruby script that could do the trick.

I tried a few different pieces of freeware, including the very excellent and simple Photocast Viewer, and DashCast, but neither can set the desktop image (they do not claim to be able to, it was simply wishful thinking on my part). I found several ways to get what I wanted in screensaver form, including using 1001 ‘s screensaver, and subscribing to the flickr bonsai RSS feed as a photocast in iPhoto and then selecting that photocast album in the Screen Saver tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver system prefs. I even toyed with running those screensavers on my desktop using several more excellent freewares, and running the OS X ScreenSaverEngine from the command line (from this hint ). Unfortunately, all of these tended to eat up more of my aging 667mhz Tibook’s CPU than I was willing to sacrifice.

My first attempt at a simpler solution was thwarted rather quickly. After you subscribe to a photocast in iPhoto, you can select it in the Desktop tab of the Desktop & Screen Saver system prefs, but for some reason the “Change picture” checkbox is disabled . You can only select a single photo from the photocast album this way. This seems like a fairly silly restriction, and I can’t think of any real technical reason for it since you can seemingly accomplish the same effect using the technique above. It could simply be a bug, or unintentional omission on Apple’s part.

As is almost always the case, there turned out to be a far simple solution than most all of these. It just took some time for my brain to get there. I do hope that Apple removes the restriction of not being able to use the “Change picture” feature with photocast albums, as that would certainly be the simplest solution … and they could even tout it as a feature!

Tags: howto, osx, photography, software