So, I was getting a bit fed up with the same kind of wallpapers popping up on my work laptop, and it occurred to me that it would be cool to have wallpapers based on photos of my top artists and musicians.
A few years ago I discovered a really good freeware application for windows called John’s Background Switcher, which scours your hard drive for photos, and then generates random wallpapers for you in a variety of styles. It supports multiple desktops, resizes smaller images, can do montages, mosaics, and has tons of options for tweaking it. It’s pretty awesome.
Now, I could manually download a bunch of pictures of my favourite artists, organise them into folders, and let JBS do the rest, but that could get a little tedious. Wouldn’t it be much better if JBS could download pictures directly off Last.fm for you? Well, it can.
In fact, JBS can download images from Facebook, Flickr, Google images, and many other sources, including RSS feeds. Coincidentally, it just so happens we have a web service in our API called artist.getImages which returns the top 50 images of any artist in the form of an rss feed.
e.g. http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/radiohead/images.rss
So all you have to do in Background switcher is add a new RSS photo feed, and paste the above link with the name of your artist.
Once you’ve added several of your top artists, you can then sit back and watch your desktop randomly change….
…or, you can set it up to save to a specific folder on your computer. Currently I’ve set my screensaver to use the new last.fm images folder, giving me a constantly evolving Last.fm artists slideshow.
Well, I think it’s neat. 
Of course the image quality is variable – not all images uploaded to Last.fm work well as desktop wallpapers, although JBS can do a pretty decent job resizing images over a certain size. Smaller images are probably best used as postcard or polaroid montages. Very occasionally you’ll get a NSFW image, but hey, that’s part of the fun right?
Of course, the next step is for JBS to actually accept your Last.fm username, and then use artist images from your library and recent track history. I think it would be great if it were possible to scan your ‘Now playing’ status and actually change your wallpaper to the artist currently playing – but sadly that’s not possible.
Well, there we go – hope it works for you.
(Just please don’t kill our image servers with huge mosaic images…)
Here’s a few examples using the postcard mode. Similar artists and themes work best.
Now that is cool! I didn’t know you could get an RSS feed like that from last.fm.
Anyway, I’ll add the last.fm support as you’ve described to the list for the next version of JBS as I can see it’ll be straightforward via the API. Plus my brother and various friends have been nagging me for years to use last.fm so it’s about time! Thanks for the nudge!
Hi John, thanks for commenting (and many thanks for your Background switcher!). Proper Last.fm support would be fantastic – it’s not much, but we could give you a small mention on our build/last.fm site, and a free subscription in return.
I’m not a developer, but if you have questions about the API, I should be able to find someone who can help.
Unfortunately our site took a turn for the worse yesterday and several core services are down at the moment, causing problems with API calls; but once that’s all fixed everything should return to normal again.
Thanks again and all the best!
Cool, it’ll be a little time before I start on the next version of JBS but will let you know when I do. And thanks!