How to create a desktop wallpaper slideshow on Ubuntu 20.04

This short tutorial will show you how to manually create a desktop slide show with photos on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

If you’re just looking for automatic wallpaper changing software, you have four options.

Ubuntu Gnome allows you to create your own wallpaper slideshow using a simple XML file and select it in the background settings.

The background XML slideshow is displayed with a small clock emblem in the lower right corner of the preview. (See the red rectangle area in the photo)

To create a desktop slide show via XML:

1.) First create an empty document and rename it to FILE_NAME.xml.

• It doesn’t matter where you put the XML file. In my case I created it in a subfolder of my photo directory: Pictures/Wallpaper/slideshow..
• And the name does not matter. In my case it is wallpaper-slideshow.xml..

2.) Open the XML file in a text editor and write the following line.

  
    60.0
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic1.jpg
  
  
    0.5
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic1.jpg
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic2.jpg
  
  
    300.0
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic2.jpg
  
  
    0.5
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic2.jpg
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/PicN.png
  
  
    60.0
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/PicN.png
  
  
    0.5
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/PicN.png
    /home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/Pic1.jpg
   

The contents of the file are easy to read. Then it starts , Followed by node.

within You can add nodes. And The node depends on the number of wallpaper files.

While The node has the display time (in seconds) and the path to the image file, Contains migration times and files.

Click to expand:

Displays an XML slide show with background settings.

Open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and run the command to create the .local / share / gnome-background-properties folder (if it doesn’t exist).

mkdir .local/share/gnome-background-properties

Then create a configuration file and open it with a Gedit text editor.

gedit .local/share/gnome-background-properties/my-slideshow.xml

Once open, paste the following line and change the file path. node:

Wallpaper Slideshow created by Ji
/home/ji/Pictures/Wallpapers/slideshow/wallpaper-slideshow.xml
zoom

Finally, open or reopen the background settings to see the newly created background slideshow.