Random Desktop Backgrounds From Nested Folders

[Fluvance]

Hello everyone, I have a stickler for you.
I've been searching for a while, and cannot seem to find an easy answer.

I would like to set up the random desktop background on my Mac. My problem, is that the folder I would like to get the images from, is organized into many subfolders. I am not aware of any simple fix to natively get Mac to find photos from more than a single folder.

I know that you can set up symbolic links, but I would like to avoid that, as I have tens of thousands of photos stretched across hundreds of folders.

If anyone knows of a solution, whether in the form of a script, or application or anything else imaginable, then it would be highly appreciated.

Thank you, and have a nice day!

 

[Jessica Lares]

If you do a search for JPG/etc files, point it to the folder you're working in it'll list all of the images in every subfolder and you can just drag/copy them into a new folder.

 

[Fluvance]

If you do a search for JPG/etc files, point it to the folder you're working in it'll list all of the images in every subfolder and you can just drag/copy them into a new folder.

Hmm 120 GB isn't fun to have duplicated!

I tried a variation of your suggestion: View all the files, but then alias them instead. That leads to just a multi-GB folder. I'll be using that for now, but hopefully someone will have a more versatile solution.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[w0lf]

Hello everyone, I have a stickler for you.
I've been searching for a while, and cannot seem to find an easy answer.

I would like to set up the random desktop background on my Mac. My problem, is that the folder I would like to get the images from, is organized into many subfolders. I am not aware of any simple fix to natively get Mac to find photos from more than a single folder.

I know that you can set up symbolic links, but I would like to avoid that, as I have tens of thousands of photos stretched across hundreds of folders.

If anyone knows of a solution, whether in the form of a script, or application or anything else imaginable, then it would be highly appreciated.

Thank you, and have a nice day!

If you have iPhoto there's a fairly simple way to do this. Sadly smart folders can't be used for some reason but you can use iPhoto to get around this.

1) Go to your picture folder that contains all your other picture folders
2) Hit Command+F to start a search
3) Add the search param (Kind) is (Image) (All)
4) This will show all your photos in your pictures folder and all it's sub directories
5) Open iPhoto preferences and in advanced uncheck "Copy items to the iPhoto Library"
6) Back in your search results press Command+A to select everything
7) Drag into iPhoto and let it import
8) In system prefs select the event you just imported to be used for desktop backgrounds