Decoratr is a small program that changes my Windows desktop background automatically. I wrote it for my own needs and purposes, but I thought that it might be useful enough to others, too.

Before you even think about downloading it, let me get this off my chest:

This is an early ‘alpha’ release. It might have bugs and it doesn’t include all planned features.

Use the program at your own risk. I make no warranties whatsoever.

If you find it useful nonetheless and you’d like to make a suggestion, feel free to let me know.

The Big Picture

• Simple to install and uninstall.
• Easy and quick configuration.
• Automatically runs when the desktop boots up.
• Supports many popular image file formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TARGA, TIFF and a few more).
• Free, as in beer.

The Download

decoratr.zip (675 KB, changelog.txt)

Before You Get Started

Unpack the distro into a location of your choice. When the program is being run for the first time it will automatically install itself, assuming that the location it is being run from is the preferred installation location.

You can uninstall the program either via its program menu entry or via the control panel. Afterwards, you may simply delete the ‘decoratr’ directory.

How It’s Used

After the installation the program is automatically run each time Windows boots up the desktop. In addition to that, it can be run at any time to trigger another background change.

To specify how the program operates you edit an XML file called ‘decoratr.xml’.

The top-level ‘set’ element groups together a collection of wallpapers. The ‘path’ attribute specifies a directory relative to wich all wallpaper files will be fetched from. Make sure that it’s a proper path, including a terminating slash. The ‘when’ attribute specifies when a background change should occur once the program is run and it can be set to either ‘always’ (default), ‘hourly’ or ‘daily’. The ‘order’ attribute specifies how a wallpaper should be selected and it can be set to either ‘random’ (default) or ‘shuffle’.

The ‘wallpaper’ element defines a wallpaper image. The ‘src’ attribute specifies either a full path or a relative path (relative to a parent set) to an image file. The ‘style’ parameter specifies how the image is placed on the desktop background and it can be set to either ‘centered’, ‘tiled’ or ‘stretched’ (default).

Examples

Example 1: A very basic setup.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'>
<set>
  <wallpaper src="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/foobar1.jpg" />
  <wallpaper src="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/foobar2.jpg" />
  <wallpaper src="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/foobar3.jpg" />
</set>

Example 2: Fetching wallpapers relative to a parent path.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'>
<set path="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/">
  <wallpaper src="foobar1.jpg" />
  <wallpaper src="foobar2.jpg" />
  <wallpaper src="foobar3.jpg" />
</set>

Example 3: Automatically searching for wallpaper images in a given directory.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'>
<set path="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/" />

Example 4: Various attributes.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'>
<set path="C:/My Files/My Pictures/Yadda Yadda/" when="daily" order="shuffle">
  <wallpaper src="foobar1.jpg" style="centered" />
  <wallpaper src="foobar2.jpg" style="tiled" />
  <wallpaper src="foobar3.jpg" style="stretched" />
</set>