Over the years I’ve spotlighted scores of wallpaper apps, scripts and extensions for Ubuntu that change your desktop background automatically, often fetching high-res images from online sites like Bing, NASA and Wikimedia.
So nothing new, right?
Well, yeah.
Picture of the Day is another app in same vein, this one built using Rust with a GTK4/libadwaita GUI.
It’s not a “do everything” wallpaper app, instead focusing on online providers that share new imagery each and every day.
Using it, you’re able to preview the latest ‘picture of the day’ from well-known online sources, as well learn more about what the image shows (if that info is provided). If you like an image you see you can hit a button to set it as your desktop wallpaper.
You can also tell the app to auto-download a new image of the day and set it as your desktop wallpaper, meaning you’ll always have something fresh to gawp at when you login each day.
As I said, there are plenty of great wallpaper changer tools for Linux desktops. Many also allow you to preview, download and auto-set art from a variety of online sources, stores and silos, or sift though as a stash of local image files.
Thing is: with more sources, more previews, and more choice comes decision paralysis (or worse: doomscrolling to appease dopamine – ‘what if there’s an even better wallpaper next?’).
Worse, it is easy to end up enabling a backend whose content veers more to the wild side — you’ve less chance of finding a scantily-clad model draped over your desktop using Picture of the Day (though some may consider that a con…).
A small set of sources are included in Picture of the Day:
- NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
- NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day [new]
- Bing Image of the Day (plus previous 7 days)
- Wikimedia Picture of the Day
- Earth Science Picture of the Day [new]
- Simon Stålenhag (Swedish sci-fi artist)
The first 3 of these are well-known and popular with users across different OSes because they showcase new human-curated, high-quality and/or novel imagery each and every day.
Adding Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s art mixes things up. Sci-fi fans might be familiar with his name since Stålenhag’s art was direct inspiration for (the painfully overlooked) Amazon Prime TV series Tales from the Loop.
Chances are the app will expand the range of sources on offer in time, so if you’re reading this article in a few months time you may find more sources provided (and if so, let me know so I can update the post).
As a GTK4/libadwaita app, Picture of the Day gels well with the modern GNOME desktop Ubuntu uses.
You do need to provide the app with the necessary permission to change desktop background, be it automatically or just when you see an image you like:
More features are planned, including more image sources and making it easy for users to save an image they like so they can (manually) set it as a wallpaper again at a later date (copyright and licensing may mean you can’t edit or distribute it, etc).
In all, an interesting app for customisation fans.
Those who enjoy having a pretty desktop Picture of the Day should appeal – a true “set and forget and enjoy what you get” type tool, you don’t need go off and find new wallpapers yourself since you’ll get a fresh one each and every day.
Install Picture of the Day on Ubuntu
Interested in checking it out?
You can install it from Flathub—it uses the GNOME 48 runtime so if that isn’t already installed it will have to be downloaded first, but the runtime is shared by all apps which use it—or you can fetch the source code on GitHub to compile it by hand.