I have been steadily accumulating favorites in flickr for some time now, thanks to the lovely feeds that they offer. But I want them as backdrops for my desktop. I didn’t spot anything else with my 30s of googling, so I wrote a small script to dump my favorites into a directory.
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the flickr.rb library is to get along with. It’s really trivial to use. I suspect that this is a by product of the flickr api design.
My main disappointment was realising how few people make the full size photos available. In the end, I limited the downloader to photos that are at least 600 pixels in width, otherwise I just ended up with very squished blobs on my backdrop.
The results are worth it. Each time I look at my desktop I now have a fresh picture in it. It makes me smile a lot anyway, and that can’t be a bad thing.
Jabbering Giraffe 