My Desktop Wallpaper Collection

I am a man of many wallpapers. Wallpapers, that are highly desireable. Wallpapers, that are high in resolution. And wallpapers, that are highly seasonal.

The Script

I call this script seasonalwallpaper. It chooses a random wallpaper based on the current month associated with a season.

Its only prerequisite is that you store your wallpapers within 4 subdirectories of ~/.local/share/wallpaper corresponding to the seasonal theme of that wallpaper (spring, summer, fall, winter).

And yes, I am aware that seasons technically start/end on either an equinox or a solstice and not just at the beginning/end of the month. I am a programmer; I value elegant code, not true-to-life accuracy.

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#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
	spring|summer|fall|winter) dir=~/.local/share/wallpaper/$1 ; xwallpaper --zoom "`shuf -n1 -e $dir/*`" ;;
	*)
		case `date +%b` in
			Dec|Jan|Feb) $0 winter ;;
			Mar|Apr|May) $0 spring ;;
			Jun|Jul|Aug) $0 summer ;;
			Sep|Oct|Nov) $0 fall   ;;
		esac
	;;
esac

This was one of the first shell scripts I wrote once I started using Linux. I was blown away by how easily and elegantly I was able to implement this function in my OS. Unlike in Windows, where you would have to either edit registry entries or use the Win32 API to acheive a similar result. I would say it is a prime example the complexity/impossibility of extending Windows beyond what Microsoft designs it for. This script was a main contributor in convincing me of the utility of a scriptable operating system, funnily enough.

Downloads:

All of the wallpapers together currently total around 1020MB. Because of the large size, I am making the collection available to download from Google Drive since I don’t mind wasting Google’s bandwidth instead of my own!

Here is the permalink – wallpapers.tar

The download is an uncompressed tarball for convenience since the images are already encoded using lossy compression. So compressing the tarball on top of that would only save a few MBs as most.

Attribution of Copyrighted Works

A majority of these photos are from wallpaper websites that do not give attribution to the original photographers or any copyright notice. So in lieu of spending my Saturday evening sitting down and scrounging for the source of each particular picture, I will instead choose to continue that trend without shame!

However, I will note that you use this wallpaper pack, then you will find several familiar pictures at the following links:

• Markus Trienke
• Paul Stewart

Others are mine and I will eventually upload some of my photography to this site since I do enjoy taking photos of nature as an occasional hobby.

And I don’t think any of the wallpapers are AI generated since I downloaded them all years ago before image generation was widely available or any good.