Blackpool Creative with Bryce Haymond

Flickr Interestingness Dynamic Theme for Windows 7

Post By Bryce Haymond ~ 22nd March 2011

A new dynamic theme for Windows 7 that pulls the most interesting photos directly from Flickr and puts it on your desktop wallpaper

Did you know that Windows 7 has a feature called dynamic themes?  This is a cool new feature that allows for themes that use RSS feeds to pull new wallpaper content from the Internet and display it on your desktop, and automatically update as new content is added to the feed.  Many people seem to have enjoyed Bing’s trial run of their dynamic theme, but it only lasted from August 9th to November 9th, 2010.  Now that Bing is done, where is there to turn for new fresh dynamic theme wallpaper?  I didn’t find any, so I made a way to get some. 

What is one of the best places for high-quality, interesting, random photos on the Internet?  Flickr, of course!  But Flickr doesn’t offer any RSS feeds of their top content for easy use (and certainly not in a format digestible by W7 dynamic themes).  So I put together a mashup that generates just the right RSS feed of Flickr’s Interestingness daily content.

What is “Interestingness” you say?  Flickr defines it:

Besides being a five syllable word suitable for tongue twisters, it is also an amazing new Flickr Feature.

There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic content and stories are added to Flickr.

Flickr’s Interestingness is basically a cool way of exploring some of the most popular content on Flickr.  So why not put these cool photos on your desktop, always automatically updating to the newest stuff of the day?

Using some Flickr API and Yahoo Pipes magic, I’ve put together a theme file that does just that.  All you have to do is download the “.theme” text file below, double-click the file in Windows 7, and select “Download Attachments” to enable the dynamic theme.  This will initiate it downloading the best photography content straight from Flickr to put on your desktop.

Download Flickr Interestingness Dynamic Theme for Windows 7 v1.0

It does take a few minutes for the feed to download initially, so if you see black wallpaper, don’t despair!  Just give it some time to work.  Also, this Windows 7 feature seems to only work when Internet Explorer is open (it looks like it uses IE’s built-in feeds feature).  So if you want your wallpaper to update, you’ll need to at least keep IE running, so that it can update the feed.  (If anyone knows how to get dynamic themes to work with other browsers, I’m all ears).  In addition, you may want to adjust the properties of the feed inside Internet Explorer to only keep the last 5-10 photos downloaded, to make sure your wallpaper only rotates through the newest content.  Go to your “Feeds” setting inside IE, and right-click on the “pipes” feed listed there.  Then go to “Properties.”  At the bottom of that dialog you can adjust the number of downloads to keep.  From that dialog you can also adjust how often to check the feed for updates.

Oh, and by the way, if you see a photo you like, and want to find out more about it, open the feed in Internet Explorer, and click on the item title in the list.  This will take you to the Flickr page for that photo, where you can see the author, comments, etc.

Let me know what you think of this new (and only, it seems) dynamic theme for Windows 7!  Please report any problems you might have with it also, and I’ll try to fix it.  Enjoy!