Max Beatty

I love find­ing new desk­top wall­pa­pers that I can hide in the back­ground behind the dozens of win­dows I typ­i­cally have open. Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse of one of the nearly 150 I’ve col­lected over the years. Know­ing that I’ll be get­ting a new work com­puter in a few weeks, I won­dered if there would be a sim­ple way share and sync my wall­pa­pers between a few com­put­ers. Drop­box to the rescue!

If you’ve been liv­ing under a rock and haven’t heard of Drop­box, it’s “soft­ware that syncs your files online and across your com­put­ers” for free. You can view the full tour of fea­tures and use this link to sign up (please do since I’ll get 250 MB in addi­tional space).

I had the idea to move my exist­ing direc­tory of wall­pa­pers to my Drop­box folder so that they would be backed up in the cloud and also avail­able for other com­put­ers to use. Drop­box is so awe­some that they auto­mat­i­cally cre­ated a gallery of all of my wall­pa­pers to share with you! Feel free to steal any you like. I got them all for free so I don’t think the orig­i­nal design­ers would mind.

Mac OS X Instructions

Open up Sys­tem Pref­er­ences and click on the Desk­top and Screen­saver icon.

Desk­top and Screen­saver Settings

Then, click the ‘+’ and nav­i­gate to your Drop­box folder. I’ve placed my ‘wall­pa­pers’ folder inside my ‘Pho­tos’ folder which allows me to share them pub­licly as a gallery.

Drop­box — Pho­tos — Wallpapers

I then set some gen­eral options like cen­ter­ing pho­tos that won’t fill my screen, change pic­ture every 15 min­utes, ran­dom order, and keep the menu bar translucent.

When I get my work com­puter that’ll run Win­dows, I can fol­low these sim­ple direc­tions and have the same pic­tures on both com­put­ers. Then if I find a new back­ground, I can add it to my ‘wall­pa­pers’ direc­tory on either com­puter and it will auto­mat­i­cally show up on the other.

If you’re look­ing to share desk­top wall­pa­pers with some­one else like a coworker, fam­ily mem­ber, or friend, you could use Dropbox’s share fea­ture to col­lab­o­rate on your collection.

I hope this lit­tle Drop­box trick will spur other inter­est­ing and use­ful uses for both you and me. If you have any wall­pa­pers that are plain awe­some, please leave them in the com­ments so I can add them to my collection!