random-wallpaper-gnome/README.md

Random Wallpaper for GNOME

A Python script to pick a random photo from the specified directory, set the wallpaper (for both light and dark) and the accent color.

Why does this exist

We'd like to change our wallpaper every 15 minutes and automatically set a pre-defined accent color for each photo. There are many GNOME Shell extensions out there that can do something similar, but we simply want to achieve the same effect without using any extensions, especially when upgrading to a pre-release GNOME version that many extensions don't support yet.

So instead of a GNOME Shell extension, we created a Python script that does everything via gsettings and hook it up to a systemd timer instead.

How to use

1. Create a directory with desired photos and note its full path
2. In that directory, rename your photos according to this table

Suppose the filename is example.jpg

Accent Color	Suffix	Expected filename
Blue	blue	example-blue.jpg
Teal	teal	example-teal.jpg
Green	gree	example-gree.jpg
Yellow	yell	example-yell.jpg
Red	redd	example-redd.jpg
Pink	pink	example-pink.jpg
Purple	purp	example-purp.jpg
Slate	-	any file without valid suffix above

This means if there is no valid color suffix at the end of file name, we will set the accent color to Slate.

3. In change-wallpaper.py, replace the directory_path with the path from step 1
4. Put change-wallpaper.py to ~/.local/bin and make sure it is in your $PATH
5. In change-wallpaper.service replace youruser in ExecStart line with your actual username.
6. Optionally, modify change-wallpaper.timer as needed. The default is set to every 15 minutes.
7. Put change-wallpaper.service and change-wallpaper.timer in ~/.config/systemd/user/ and run these commands to get started

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable --now change-wallpaper