Wally- Awesome Wallpaper Rotator for Windows, Mac & Linux

Staring at the same wallpaper everyday can become incredibly boring. On the other hand, having to go searching for new wallpapers is often a long and tedious task.

This is why we, the neighborhood geeks, prefer wallpaper applications, more specifically wallpaper rotator applications.

There are a multitude of wallpaper applications available – most freeware – but almost none as diverse as Wally.

Wally – The Wallpaper Rotator

Wally is one of those ‘wallpaper applications’. It aggregates pictures and wallpapers from a variety of sources and flips through them while you’re working. If you set it up right, you’ll never have to worry about searching for a fresh wallpaper again. You’ll have one – every new day, hour or even minute.

The wallpaper rotator application is open-sourced and available for all operating systems; it won’t matter to Wally if you’re a Mac, PC or Linux fanatic. I’ve also tested it for Windows 7, and it works like a charm.

Wally beautifully integrates in the dock taskbar. By right-clicking the icon, a list of options will enfold. The ones you’ll want to use is Play/Pause (to initiate and terminate the wallpaper rotations) and Next photo (if you don’t like the sight). If you’re really fond of a certain wallpaper you can also save it to your disk or explore the source.

Wallpaper Sources

But the real power of Wally over other wallpaper rotator applications is its incredibly wide variety of image sources. Where others are often targeted at a single wallpaper database or image search engine, Wally supports no less than ten image sites. You can create custom searches, or load several local image directories.

To add one of those online image searches, open the settings window and navigate to the relevant search engine in the sidebar and press Add. You’ll be asked for a little basic information.

Add the words you want to search for. I simply added ‘widescreen wallpaper’ (without the quotation marks), but you can search for cars, Apple iPhone wallpapers, or whatever you want. At the right of the screen, use the drop-down menu to classify your search (it will search all words as a default).

At the bottom you’ll see another drop-down menu. If you don’t want any pornographic material to appear on your desktop, leave it as be. Otherwise – yeah, I think you’ll figure it out.

Additional Settings

Going down the left sidebar, you’ll see another ’settings’ tab. There are some other options you might like to configure. For instance, if you enjoy using Wally, I suggest you enable ‘Play automatically on application start’ and ’start automatically when system starts’. Other interesting options are ‘Choose in random order’ and ‘Only use landscape-oriented photos’. What these settings will do is self-explanatory.

At the top of the screen, you can also configure the rotation frequency – in other words, how often you want the background to be changed – and the background color. Default is set at 2 minutes, but most people will prefer a little more sporadic rotation.

Did you enjoy Wally? Tell us in the comments if you know of any other wallpaper rotator software!