Wallpaper mode option (span, zoom, etc) inside Variety. Resolution filtering.

[David Tigue]

I love your application, but I have a few requests. First of all I have two monitors setup on my machine both with 1600x900 resolution. But I use 3200x900 wallpapers and set them to 'Span' in Ubuntu's wallpaper settings so that I can use the entire wallpaper across both screens. I would love to be able to set "Span, Stretch, Tile, etc.", from within your application. Also I would like to be able to specify the resolution of the wallpapers I want the application to download and set on my machine. Right now the application sets whatever size it wants to without asking me what size I prefer. If I could set the application to ONLY download 3200x900 resolution wallpapers and set the wallpapers to 'Span' then I would use this application all the time. Until then I will have to continue to set my wallpaper manually. Thanks for all the great work.

David Tigue
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[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

"I would love to be able to set "Span, Stretch, Tile, etc.", from within your application.".
Set it from Ubuntu's Appearance settings and Variety will not override your choice.
In my opinion such an option would be duplicating existing functionality and creating a confusion as to how it relates to the original setting in Ubuntu's Appearance dialog, that's why I have not included it. But in reality lots of people ask how this is done and seem to expect it to be in the application. I'd like to hear some more discussion on this.

Re: Resolution - for downloading this will be difficult, as the different online sources provide very different means for dealing with image resolution, and most in fact do not support searching by specific resolution. So a special feature for filtering downloads by resolution is improbable at the moment. Your best bet is probably to use Flickr or Picasaweb (via Media RSS) and specify the resolution somehow in the tags/search words.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

TODO: Let's add these parameters to set_wallpaper script: image width and height. This will make it easy to have the script change the wallpaper mode between span/zoom, etc. conditionally, depending on the image size, which will be useful for multi-monitor users.

[Lee Cawley (lee-cawley)]

It appears that Variety does overwrite the settings chosen in LinuxMint. I set it to "Centre" in the background settings, and when Variety changed to the next wallpaper, it had changed the setting back to "Zoom".

I know very little about Linux, I am using it on a virtual machine in windows, so this could be a Mint specific problem... really not sure.

[Henrik Z (hezla)]

I am also using Linux Mint 16 and experience the same. The settings is set to zoom all the time, no matter what I set in Mint's background setup.

Another thing, I would like is 2 monitor support

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Lee Cawley, Henrik Z, can you please send me the output from running 'env' on your machine (strip whatever sensitive data there is) - I'd like to see how Mint 16 with Cinnamon relates to the info in this thread: http://askubuntu.com/questions/72549/how-to-determine-which-window-manager-is-running

Regarding two monitor support please read here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/variety/+bug/1132140 and here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/variety/+bug/1096035. In short - different wallpapers on multiple monitors are not supported by most DEs, you can use 'span' to have one wallpaper span both, some other bugs are present when running on multiple monitors that are low-priority.