reddit-wallpapers

This program will fetch, download, and save the 100 (changeable number) hottest wallpapers from the r/wallpaper subreddit to a folder in your computer. It can also optionally remove low-quality images, and then cycle through the dozens of images and set them as your desktop background.

Requirements

• beautifulsoup4 (for BeautifulSoup) (pip3 install beautifulsoup4)
• praw (pip3 install praw)
• lxml (pip3 install lxml)

All the above modules are available on PyPI. You can download them each individually or simply run pip3 install -r requirements.txt in the folder that houses requirements.txt.

Reddit Bot Setup

In order for reddit-wallpapers to work, you must create your own Reddit bot. Reddit itself does not provide access to the links and content on its pages, so creating a bot that is given permission to go through its database is required. This takes about 5 mins, and the steps are outlind below.

1. Go to https://reddit.com/prefs/apps and login if you are asked to do so. This is where you will create the bot.
2. Scroll to the bottom and click 'create another application'. Fill out the details as follows:

• Name: ImageBot
• Type: script
• Description: Any description you want
• Redirect URL: http://localhost:8080

3. Once you have done the above, click create app. You should now see a bot named ImageBot on your page.
4. Go to the bottom left of the ImageBot square and click edit. You will now see some information about the bot - most importantly, your personal use script and secret.
5. Go to wherever you have saved the add_images.py program and start replacing. Replace client_id with your personal use script (seen at the top of the bot square). Replace your client_secret with your 27-character secret key (also seen in the bot square). Replace HIDDEN with your username, and HIDDEN_PASSWORD with your password. You are now all set up with your very own Reddit bot that can read data from Reddit! There's only a few more things to do before you too can get that beautiful changing background!

Usage

First, you need to make sure that you have all the required modules intalled. These are all outlined in requirements.txt and they can be downloaded using pip. Without them downloaded, the program will not run.

Once you have done so, all you need to do is change the os.chdir() line. Currently, it is pointing to a folder on my Desktop, but you will need to change that so it matches an absolute path on your computer (i.e. change Users/Destaq to Users/ and either create a directory in the Desktop or make it point to another blank directory.

The only thing left to do at this point is run the program, with python3 add_images.py. Keep in mind that it may take a few minutes to download all the images due to hardware or Internet limitations. However, you can rest assured as there is a progress bar showing which image is currently being downloaded/processed. You may also notice at the bottom of the code that there are a few lines which check and delete small images. Not all images posted on r/wallpaper are clear, and so the program deletes ones which are smaller than 200 kB. You can change this size, or remove the deletion entirely (but fuzzy images may show up on Desktop).

Last note: Once you have all of your images downloaded to your folder, all you have to do is navigate to your System Preferences/Settings and change the directory where your computer gets its images from. Below is an image showing how to do so on Mac. I recommend setting random order to true to be excited each time you see a new picture!

PS: I've made another cycling wallpaper program, but this one is even better! It teaches you languages, countries, and more straight from your wallpaper, with contributions welcome to help expand the number of topics! Check it out here.