SweetMacTips

Sweet App Sunday - DeskLickr

This week, I bring you an awesome app called DeskLickr. Do you like beautiful desktop pictures but hate hunting them down? DeskLickr’s for you. What it does is use Flickr as a source for desktop pictures and you can tell it exactly what you want.  What’s the result?

This:

DeskLickr ends up in your menubar (that little ‘r’ in the box up there) and you can give it some customization:

You can tell it to start at log in, how often to change the picture, what to do with the image (scale, stretch, fit) etc.  One great (and important) checkbox is that “ignore images smaller than your monitor” one. This will prevent images that don’t have the resolution to display nicely on your monitor from showing up in the rotation. Nobody likes a blocky, pixelated desktop picture.

The HUD it refers to is that little floating “About this photo” window you see. You can always get rid of it, but I like knowing just what I’m looking at and it gives appropriate credit to who took the picture. Clicking in the HUD will bring you to the Flickr page where the photo came from. I like to click on ones that I like and further explore what the photographer has.

Here’s the real meat of the app:

If you supply your Flickr username, you can have it display pictures from your PhotoStream, your favorites, group photos, or my favorite, by tags. Here I’ve put in some tags having to do where I’d like to travel to someday; Germany.

The result? None of the “same old pictures.” Myself, I have a pictures folder of hundreds of pictures that I’ve grabbed from Flickr (paying attention to usage rights of course) that are great pictures. But even with that folder randomized, I see the same old pictures.  DeskLickr is a great way to see pictures I’m interested in but have never seen before while I work.

Best of all, DeskLickr is free. But, if you feel it’s quality, I encourage you to slide the developer a few bucks with Paypal. A side note, the developer, Aaron Wallis, is a fellow Tumblr user!

Small FYI, one little glitch I found (or at least experienced) is that my desktop wouldn’t change if I was still on the default Apple desktop. Changing it to some other desktop fixed it fine.

Check it out!