I recently made the switch from a Windows 10 machine to a Chromebook running Linux through crostini. I'm enjoying the new interface, and I've found a way to do (almost) everything I used to be able to do on my previous laptop.
Except for Tiled backgrounds. I love the way they look, and I used to look everywhere online to find small images I could make into repeating backgrounds, as well as making my own. As soon as I got my new laptop, I realized it was just missing something.
So I set out to do it myself, and I have to say I think I got kind of close. I'll admit I spent an afternoon on this, so it may not be the most fully featured app, or the or the most seamless implementation, since I was unable to find ways of automating the actual setting of the wallpaper, but I managed to put together a small command line utility to allow a user to select a small image, and have in return a tiled background made from that image, cropped up to a given size (default is 1920x1080).
I might add some more functionality if I ever feel the need to, but for now it's really just out there.
To test it out, you can use the included example folder: it includes a sample image coming from my copy of the 10PRINT script from old Commodore 64 computers, which lends itself pretty well to this kind of wallpaper. Simply run:
python3 tiled.py example/example.png --output_path ./example/
and navigate to the example folder to retreive your new image.
To use your own images, the syntax is very similar: simply point to your original image's path, and add an optional output directory. You'll get a tiled wallpaper of the original image of size 1920x1080, stretched.jpg. You change the output size through the command line option --size, formatted as {width}x{height}.
The first time it's called without an explicit output path, the program creates a folder in the user's home directory, called wallpapers. In that folder, every time the program is called with a file with a new name, a folder is created with the name of the file that generated it, containing the output file (default stretched.jpg).
BE CAREFUL! This means that two file with the same name will (for the time being, at least), generate a file with the same output name, in the same folder. The earlier one will be overwritten. Please take countermeasures to avoid data loss (Rename input file, for now. I might add a way to change name as an option, but I still have to understand exactly the best way to do so).
The command uses the format:
python3 tiled.py path/to/input/file [--output_path optional/output/path] [--size new_widthxnew_height]
If you want to, you can add this script to your PATH and make it an executable, to simplify the command a little. I'm not sure how worth it it is, but you do you.
10PRINT (default example)
becomes
Spike Spiegel
becomes
JFK pride flag
becomes
I guess there's a couple of ways I could improve this:
- better interface: probably not a GUI but at least something less clunky
- more functionality, more easily accessible:
- allow the user to specify much more easily path to file and output directory;
- allow the user to pick their own final size from the command line itself;
- tell me if there's more you would like to see! open an issue and let me know :)
This program uses the Python Image Library to help with image manipulation. It quite literally wouldn't have been possible to do this without it, I think. Or rather, it would've been a lot more tedious: I guess I could have done it, but there's a high change I just would've quit halfway through. So big thanks to them.