Selecting and deselecting desktop background images

Can I select which Apple photos to use when setting desktop background to Change Picture? Put another way, can I deselect pictures I don't want to see? I hoped the "-" box at the bottom of the list would let me deselect folders or even specific images within folders, but it doesn't. I would like to have only the nature pictures in the Change Picture rotation.

You would have to create your own folder or album with select photos for this type control.
Use the + sign to add your album.

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When viewing some websites my desktop background image shows as the page background...why...and how do I fix this?

It seems that the current version of Firefox does not understand how to process style sheets. Instead of the stylesheet background color or image, I am now seeing my PC's desktop background image. This does not happen with IE or Chrome. When checking the error console, I get "Warning: Unknown property 'zoom'. Declaration dropped. Source File: http://trustserve.net/themes/ModernBlue/templates_cached/EN/global.css Line: 4"
I am not trying to zoom.
Any ideas on how to fix this. I can't use Firefox with these problems and I really liked it prior to these problems.

I thought I had it disabled. I enabled aero and then disabled to be sure, and still have the problem, but that was a very good idea. Thanks.
The problem started shortly after I installed two new programs, a graphics program, and an anti-virus. I just removed both programs and restarted the computer and that seems to have solved the problem. Your idea about Aero gave me the idea that one, or both of these programs changed some of my system settings. I am now going to install them, one at a time, and see if the transparency problem returns. I'll post my findings.

How to block changes of desktop background image

I manage a 30-computer Mac lab in a public high school and I would like to prevent users from changing the desktop background image.
As far as I know, there are two ways to change the desktop background image: through System Preferences and by right-clicking an image and selecting Set Desktop Picture.
Blocking System Preferences is easily done through Parental Controls.
But how do I prevent the right-click, Set Desktop Picture method of changing the desktop image?
You can imagine the kinds of images that end up as desktop backgrounds in a high school computer lab.

You might try going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. In the left pane select Services, then uncheck the item "Set Desktop Picture" under Pictures in the right pane. Once that's done, block that prefs pane.

Is there an ARD command or Unix command that I can send to reset the desktop background image to default?

I was forced to create a local user with an automatic login on all of the machines in the building. I listed off many various issues that could come arise by doing this but was tuned out. Now people are changing all of the desktop backgrounds to some pretty inappropriate images. I forewarned the person ordering this that this may be one of the many issues that would arise when doing away with our server based logins, and now I am charged with fixing every desktop every time someone changes it to something inappropriate.
Is that an Apple Remote Desktop command or a Unix command that I can send through ARD v3.5.3 to the machines to reset the desktop background image to the default Aqua Blue jpeg image located in the /MacintoshHD/Library/Desktop\ Pictures/Aqua\ Blue.jpg.
The machines that I am dealing with have OS X 10.4.11, OS X 10.5.8, OS X 10.6.8, and OS X 10.7.4 installed on them, but the OS X 10.4.11 machines are the ones that are creating the biggest issue so I would like to deal with those first.

Ya, I'd love to have the computers connected to the Xserver, unfortunately against my heeding, I was ordered to take them off of the Xserver, so they only have a local account that automatically logs in on startup, and even though I have Parental Controls set, I can not stop them from going to Safari, selecting an inappropriate image and setting it as the background, so now I’ve been ordered to fix all of the backgrounds that people are messing with.
My Xserver is running OS X 10.4.11 Server Edition. Yes, I would love a new server, but that’s not happening due to budget cuts.
So what I am hoping for is a command that I can put into Apple Remote Desktop v3.5.3 and push out to all of the computers via its Unix commands and reset all the desktops to their default image.

Desktop Background Images Dithering

All of my desktop background images have been dithering, despite the fact that my display is set to 32-bit color. This can be demonstrated by opening up the image used for the desktop in an image-editing application and viewing them both side-by-side. Here's a screenshot of such a comparison:
This is a major bummer - anyone have an idea what is wrong?

I should have mentioned that the dimensions of the background image exactly match the resolution of the monitor (1280x1024).
Also, yes, it is an LCD monitor, but it is hooked up via DVI.
I am wondering if it might have to do with the display card hardware (GeForce FX 5200), as I did not have this problem under the same circumstances, in tiger, but under different hardware...
So, no, still not solved - but thanks for your input.

Mac laptop screen going to sleep and changing desktop background

last weekend my daughter called to say that her Macbook was acting strange. On Friday night she saw the battery icon said 25%, so she shut the system down. The next morning she plugged it in and booted. It took a while and the desktop background had changed to something grey. Also, the screen would blank out after 30 seconds to a minute. If she hit the space bar it would show and then go black after the 30 to 60 second time period. I had her shutdown and boot to her external drive where she had a month old image of her system. It took a minute or two to boot (it always seems like a long time when you are on the phone). It came up as her normal system and background. She left it for over an hour and it did not black out or go to sleep. We were planning on doing a restore the next day, but when she did a normal boot later that day from the internal hard drive, it came up with her normal background and the screen stayed active. She had not tried to set any settings. Is there something that a low battery would do to change the energy settings? We were going to explore the settings when the system magically worked as normal. It seems strange that a boot to the external drive would restore settings so that the system worked normally.

Energy Saver and third party USB often don't go well hand in hand. I would though contact OWC and let them know you are having this problem, since they have a good track record of supporting the Mac platform. In the meantime, use Screen Saver instead of Energy Saver.
And always keep your data backed up at least twice as my FAQ explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

Setting the desktop background image via Powershell

UPDATE:
I found the solution that addressed my problem, which I posted in a post below. Keeping the original post for Internet historical reasons as I the hope this helps someone else later on in their search for a solution.
===============
I have Bing'ed and I have Google'd and I haven't found a solid answer to setting the desktop wallpaper programmically. I am trying to do this via PowerShell, but I would be happy for any other language flavor or application to work.
Below is the code I have tried to set the desktop background image. This has been scrounged from a few sources across the web. This solution works 25% of the time and I haven't figured out what the cause for success or failure of the execution. Or maybe
it's neither, but waiting for Explorer to refresh. The only way to see the change 100% is to log out and log back in.
I am running Windows 8.1 btw.
Thank you for looking.
Function Get-WallPaper()
$wp=Get-ItemProperty -path 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop\' -name wallpaper
if(!$wp.WallPaper)
{ "Wall paper is not set" }
Else
{"Wall paper is set to $($wp.WallPaper)" }
Function Refresh-Explorer {
$code = @'
private static readonly IntPtr HWND_BROADCAST = new IntPtr(0xffff);
private const int WM_SETTINGCHANGE = 0x1a;
private const int SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG = 0x0002;
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError=true, CharSet=CharSet.Auto)]
static extern bool SendNotifyMessage(IntPtr hWnd, uint Msg, UIntPtr wParam,
IntPtr lParam);
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern IntPtr SendMessageTimeout ( IntPtr hWnd, int Msg, IntPtr wParam, string lParam, uint fuFlags, uint uTimeout, IntPtr lpdwResult );
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("Shell32.dll")]
private static extern int SHChangeNotify(int eventId, int flags, IntPtr item1, IntPtr item2);
public static void Refresh() {
SHChangeNotify(0x8000000, 0x1000, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero);
SendMessageTimeout(HWND_BROADCAST, WM_SETTINGCHANGE, IntPtr.Zero, null, SMTO_ABORTIFHUNG, 100, IntPtr.Zero);
Add-Type -MemberDefinition $code -Namespace MyWinAPI -Name Explorer
[MyWinAPI.Explorer]::Refresh()
Function Set-WallPaper($Value)
echo "Setting background to: $value"
Refresh-Explorer
Set-ItemProperty -path 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop\' -name wallpaper -value $value
rundll32.exe user32.dll, UpdatePerUserSystemParameters
#sleep 1
rundll32.exe user32.dll, UpdatePerUserSystemParameters
#sleep 1
rundll32.exe user32.dll, UpdatePerUserSystemParameters
#sleep 1
Refresh-Explorer
#Stop-Process -ProcessName explorer
NOTE: I left in a few commented out statements. I found that they do not offer any help in formulating a solution.
Thank you.

Great news! I found the solution and all props and credit goes to
jsd1982 of the XKCD comic
forum from a post he made in 2007 and some deep search kung-fu Googling on my part. Here is the
direct link to the post.
This solution has worked for me 100% of the time on Windows 8. The only gotcha I found (minor detail) was when setting this process to run as a scheduled task, I had to run it as elevated privileges for the code to compile in memory. Running this function
from PowerShell at the command prompt was fine.
NOTE: The code below is a slight trimmed down version posted by jsd1982 to just set the desktop wallpaper. I removed the image fetching from the Internet and the color inversion.
# Credit to jsd1982
function Compile-Csharp ([string] $code, $FrameworkVersion="v2.0.50727",
[Array]$References)
# Get an instance of the CSharp code provider
$cp = new-object Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider
# Build up a compiler params object...
$framework = [System.IO.Path]::Combine($env:windir, "Microsoft.NET\Framework\$FrameWorkVersion")
$refs = new-object Collections.ArrayList
$refs.AddRange( @("${framework}\System.dll",
# "${mshhome}\System.Management.Automation.dll",
# "${mshhome}\System.Management.Automation.ConsoleHost.dll",
"${framework}\system.windows.forms.dll",
"${framework}\System.data.dll",
"${framework}\System.Drawing.dll",
"${framework}\System.Xml.dll"))
if ($references.Count -ge 1)
$refs.AddRange($References)
$cpar = New-Object System.CodeDom.Compiler.CompilerParameters
$cpar.GenerateInMemory = $true
$cpar.GenerateExecutable = $false
$cpar.CompilerOptions = "/unsafe";
$cpar.OutputAssembly = "custom"
$cpar.ReferencedAssemblies.AddRange($refs)
$cr = $cp.CompileAssemblyFromSource($cpar, $code)
if ( $cr.Errors.Count)
$codeLines = $code.Split("`n");
foreach ($ce in $cr.Errors)
write-host "Error: $($codeLines[$($ce.Line - 1)])"
$ce |out-default
Throw "INVALID DATA: Errors encountered while compiling code"
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing") > $null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Runtime") > $null
# C# code to post to wallpaper
$code = @'
using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using Microsoft.Win32;
namespace test
public class Wallpaper
const int SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER = 20 ;
const int SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE = 0x01;
const int SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE = 0x02;
[DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet=CharSet.Auto)]
static extern int SystemParametersInfo (int uAction , int uParam , string lpvParam , int fuWinIni) ;
public static void SetWallpaper(string uri)
System.IO.Stream s = new WebClient().OpenRead(uri);
Image img = System.Drawing.Image.FromStream(s);
Bitmap copy = new Bitmap(img.Width, img.Height);
Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(copy);
Rectangle rect = new Rectangle(0, 0, img.Width, img.Height);
g.DrawImage(img, rect, 0, 0, img.Width, img.Height, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
g.Dispose();
img.Dispose();
// Save to a temp file:
string tempPath = Path.Combine(Path.GetTempPath(), "wallpaper.bmp");
copy.Save(tempPath, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
RegistryKey key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey( @"Control Panel\Desktop", true ) ;
key.SetValue(@"WallpaperStyle", 1.ToString( ) ) ;
key.SetValue(@"TileWallpaper", 0.ToString( ) ) ;
SystemParametersInfo( SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER,
0,
tempPath,
SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE | SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE );
function Set-Wallpaper([string] $imgurl)
compile-CSharp $code
[test.Wallpaper]::SetWallpaper($imgurl)

JList Select and Deselect

well, i set my JList to be multiple selection mode,
say i made two selection on my jlist
and how could i deselect of them !
thx in advance!
Sam

You can use CTRL+click with your mouse in the interface to select and deselect things in multi-mode.
If you want to select/deselect things from inside your code, try using the setSelectedIndices(int[] indices) method which you can find in JList. It should remove whatever selections were made and instead select those items that you specified in the array.

Applet select and deselect by JCRE

Hi,
I wonder why, in term of technical design, applet should have "select" and "deselect" method. This implies that the applet can select/ deselect by its self. (invoking these methods inside another method)
However, the JCRE is the one who perform applet selection. Therefore, the right location to define select and deselect should be in the JCRE implementation.
Do you have the same idea or there are advantages by defining select, deselect in each applet to be considered?
thanks,
Hoang Long

Some secure Java Card platforms check that the caller's context is the JCRE, hence making the (de)select() un-invokable by anything else than the JCRE.
You shouldn't do anything critical in the deselect() method, as you have no guarantee that it will be invoked, in particular when a power loss occurs.
For more information, you should read the JCRE specification, there are some chapters on process()/select()/deselect() methods.

Can we resize and change the background image in a 2 page layout?

I am a two page layout report in RTF. Can I use different background image on page 1 and page 2? The first page background will not be repeated but the second page will. Also, it seems when we insert a background image by going "Format -> Background -> Fill effect -> Picture", after we finished the whole process we can't get the background image to fit with the page, can we resize it to be fit with the page? Thanks for your help!

Yes. Select the image and go to the Inspector/Hyperlink/Link pane and use the Link to One of my Pages option.
Remember: the photo must be added to the page by dragging it onto the page and then be selected. It can't be added as a background image with the Inspector/Page/Layout pane.
OT

Problem selecting and deselecting photos

My mind is confused. Last night I was carefully selecting photos from about 900 in the browse view. I held down the command key continually and then left clicked one image I wanted after another. Sometimes after chosing 45 images, sometimes after only 10, Aperture 3 would on its own start all over. The count at the bottom of the view would reset to 1. All the images I had just selected were deselected. I did this seveal times, always being very careful to click only in the images and no where else. The thumbnails were large, so accuracy was not an issue. I would scroll down using the wheel, always holding down the command key. It seemed to have a mind of its own. i'm well familiar with the Finder interface, so it wasn't me being clunky. I repeated this behavior a number of times...baffling behavior. Besides Aperture 3 being beastly slow on my imac, this was extremely irritating and buggy. Am I the only one who has experienced? What say you Apple? Thank you collective.

Thanks Mark, but you answered what I already included within my question. I wrote "So it's that, or disabling the hyperlink, move the object normally, and putting the hyperlink on again"
With that, to "Uncheck the "Make hyperlinks active" you need to first select the object, and you end up back to the first and second problem I wrote.

Cannot change Desktop Background image

When I go to change my Desktop Background, it will try and load up the pictures in my Pictures folder (but no subfolders). I can switch my background to one of these images, even though the "Loading" progress bar is still visible.
Here is the odd thing, however. If I click on any of the other types of images (Apple Images, nature, Plants, Black & White, Abstract, and Solid Colors), nothing appears. I jumped over to another user on the same computer, and those images populated properly. Any ideas on what is going wrong? Why can't I change my background image? I've had this problem with both Mac OS 10.5.0 and 10.5.1.

I managed to fix this problem.
I did verify and repair permissions just for kicks. Not sure if that helped or not, but I did it anyway.
Then I went back into the System Pref pane, and clicked on Apple Images, then clicked on the Change Picture checkbox. While none of the images appear in the white box, my background did change to one of the Apple Images (such as the black and purple Leopard-only background). I then closed System Preferences, opened it back up, and the images loaded up properly this time!

Dark and subtle desktop backgrounds.

I'm looking for dark desktop backgrounds that are interesting without being overly eye-catching and that integrate well into transparent terminals. After spending more time than intended tonight looking for new backgrounds, I've found the following that are almost what I want but not completely:
Black_Tech <- As the name implies, I like how this makes the desktop feel "techy", as though it were made out of rubber or metal.
Scraped <- This is a nice, non-repetitive "wallpaper".
Dark_Suede_Skull <- I like the background itself but not the skull pattern. I'm tempted to shoop it out of the image.
I think the common theme is that each of these makes the desktop feel like a surface (instead of the more common "window" effect that you get from photos etc).
If you know of anything similar, post them in this thread.

Some favorites:
Weathered Leather
Archer DeepBlack
Darkness Wall
Dark Wood
Authorized Personnel Only

AA6 - Move To Beginning/Ending Of A Selection And Deselect

Hello...
In AA3- you could make a selection, then click at the beginning/ending of the selection. It would deselect the selection and move the play head to that position.
In AA5.5 you had to use the left/right arrows to do the same task.
In AA6, neither work. If you left/right arrow, the play head moves but it moves down/up the timeline (not to the beginning/ending) and it doesn't deselect. Ctrl+left/right arrow does move the play head to the appropriate places (as well as other places) but it doesn't deselect.
Is there a way to do this with AA6?
I used it a lot when doing track breaks for cd (home, shift+click at 5:00, f8, right arrow, shift+click at 10:00, f8, etc...). I also used it where I wanted to have only 0.5 seconds of extra silence at the beginning/ending of some audio (click at the beginning of the audio, drag backwards 0.5 seconds, left arrow, shift+home, delete).
JJ

Since you're doing this for CD, I think I have a method that would be faster for you.
1. Home, Shift+M (This sets the playhead to the start and places a CD Track Marker at the playhead).
2. Click where you want this track to end and the next to start and again press Shift+M.
3. Continue placing single point CD Track Markers at each location where you want the last track to end and the new one to start (including adding one to the very end).
4. When all markers have been added, open the Markers Panel and select all the markers.
5. Press the icon in the Markers Panel for "Merge selected markers".
Now if you want to burn the CD, just go to "File > Export > Burn Audio to CD..." and we will burn a CD with track markers where you hae defined them.
--Ron

FCS showing desktop background images

I recently purchased and installed FCS, I'm running into an issue where the timeline, viewer, browser, and etc are showing the desktop background and cannot figure out what's going on.

If you have ShapeShifter installed, uninstall it and the problem should go away.
-DH

Selecting and deselecting desktop background images

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