Wallpaper Updater

The Windows Desktop Background tool will change your wallpaper at regular intervals up to once a day. If you want to change your wallpaper daily, weekly, or monthly, you can do it manually or download a tool that adds the capability. Wallpaper Updater is just such a tool. This free utility runs in the background, changing your wallpaper at regular intervals of one day or longer (or at startup) from a system folder or a Picasa Web Album.

We installed Wallpaper Updater and opened it from its Start Menu folder, which also includes a Help file and uninstaller. The program's Settings sheet is divided into two tabs, Local Disk and Picasa Web Albums. We started by browsing our system to an album of wallpaper images and selecting Consecutive Mode (the default is Random Mode). The program can change wallpaper every day, week, or month or on Windows startup, or all three by checking a box labeled Change When Period Starts. We selected the Fit To Screen Size option, too. An Additional Filters pop-up let us specify a minimum size for wallpaper in pixels; we could also click on a link in the Current Wallpaper field to open the target folder with the current wallpaper image highlighted. Clicking the Never Show button added images to the Black List feature for permanent exclusion. When everything was ready, we clicked OK to activate our settings. The Change Now button started our slideshow; clicking it consecutively let us flip through the images one by one. The Picasa Web Album tab is basically identical except for a checkbox to select the feature, an address field, and an Authorize button.

Wallpaper Updater is a simple yet effective tool for changing your desktop wallpaper at regular intervals. We'd like to see more options for fitting images to the screen, such as Fit, Fill, and Stretch, and maybe some widescreen options, but we like the ability to set a minimum wallpaper size and to exclude images from wallpaper displays without moving or deleting them from the folder. Shorter intervals would give it a more versatile slideshow capability, but Wallpaper Updater's simplicity will appeal to many users, especially those with pictures posted on Picasa.