bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer

Automatically downloads and changes desktop wallpaper to Bing Photo of the Day.

Synopsis

Python Script for automatically downloading and changing the desktop wallpaper to Bing Photo of the day. The script runs automatically at the startup and works on Linux with Gnome. Works perfectly on Ubuntu 16.10.

What does it do?

It grabs images exactly the same way Microsoft uses to put it up on its page - using XML/RSS/JSON. You can’t scrape the website directly. After searching on the internet for long I found out the link - http://www.bing.com/HPImageArchive.aspx?format=xml&idx=0&n=1&mkt=en-US

Here we can get data in any of the formats but substituting the value of format=[value] in the link.

idx denotes the day before the current day. idx=0 means current day, idx=1 means yesterday and so on. n is an integer denoting the number of days before the day denoted by idx. It grabs data about all the n number of images. mkt denotes the area. The script will try to match your locale to one of the supported Bing Market areas, falling back to ‘en-US’ if it fails to do so.

All the wallpapers are stored in ‘/home/[user]/Pictures/BingWallpapers/’

Installation

Clone/download project. Open terminal in the root folder of the project

Type in either of the two commands

Recommended
```
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

Or install them individually

 sudo apt-get install python-bs4

 sudo apt-get install python-lxml

Then add the script as a startup application. Type in terminal

 gnome-session-properties

then add a startup program as:

 Name: BingWallpaperChanger
 Command: python /path/to/main.py
 Comment: Automatically changes desktop wallpaper!

gnome-session-properties

If you run gnome 3 from Fedora, you have to create the file

/home/[user]/.config/autostart/bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer.desktop

the file contents look like:
```
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=python /path/to/bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer/main.py
Name=Bing Desktop Wallpaper Changer
```

Replace [user] with your actual user name and /path/to/ with your actual parent directory for the bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer directory.

Dependencies

To do

Store the details about the previous wallpapers (viz. date, filename, brief description) in an XML file so that the user can see that later too.
Permitting a limited number of wallpapers to be stored in the directory (disk space constraints)

Any other suggestions welcome!

Author

Utkarsh Gupta

License

MIT license.