John's Background Switcher icon
John's Background Switcher icon

John's Background Switcher

John’s Background Switcher (or JBS for short) periodically changes the wallpaper on your computer (like every hour or every day) to something interesting. JBS sits in your system tray (down by the clock) and changes your background at the time interval of your choosing.

John's Background Switcher screenshot 1

Cost / License

  • Freemium
  • Proprietary

Application type

Platforms

  • Mac  Paid: $8.99
  • Windows  Free
The settings dialog that controls all the functionality of JBS looks like this
The notification icon (pictured right) lets you open the settings, pause switching, view all downloaded photos (especially useful if you’re using one of the montage modes – just choose ‘Cached Picture Browser’), email or save backgrounds, check for updates and exit JBS
+1
Make your wallpapers interesting!
Alternatives  
67likes
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Features

  1.  Ad-free
  2.  Wallpaper Cycling
  3.  Sits in the System Tray

John's Background Switcher News & Activities

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Comments and Reviews

   
Top Positive Comment
John Doe
0

This is the one! Free, no bull and the randomizer actually allows you to say to yourself: "Oh, I haven't seen this one since I added it to my gallery! I knew I had it in my gallery!" It uses a way better randomizer unlike many others (including Window's built-in bs) that just repeat the images depending on the cheap time of day randomizing algo. This is a must have tool.

Senjata
1

Love this app- but it's free, not freemium. If you choose not to buy a license, the app remains fully functional.

Weltall
0

At least for what I have been wanting to use it, John's Background Switcher have been my to go program for years now. I wanted an app where it would use my handpicked pictures and after half a day it would switch them around to another. It is lightweight, sits hidden in the system tray and if you double click it's icon, it will replace the backgrounds, in case I wanted to flip through some of them manually. Also, if you have multiple monitors, it will place different backgrounds on each of them.

I am giving it 5 stars, but again, only for what I wanted to use it for, as I have never delved into it fetching pictures online from different sources.

RemovedUser
2

the best I found for two monitors.

Review from a new or low-activity account — shown here, but not counted in the app rating.
isamux
-2

For some reason the 'like' function is not working on John's Background Switcher...

isamux
2

Great tool! A really nice feature is the support for two monitors - it is possible to show different wallpapers on each monitor.

Aerialsky
0

Your pictures showed by this software can be scaled a certain way.

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Official Links

AppStores & Other Links

Download from Mac App Store

What is John's Background Switcher?

John’s Background Switcher (or JBS for short) periodically changes the wallpaper on your computer (like every hour or every day) to something interesting. JBS sits in your system tray (down by the clock) and changes your background at the time interval of your choosing. You tell it where to get pictures from and how to show them – maybe you just want to see one photo at a time or maybe you’d like to see a ‘Snapshot Scrapbook‘ of photos thrown across your desktop. It’s up to you and you never know what’s coming next!

You can specify which pictures to choose from:

  • Individual pictures on your computer.
  • Folders containing pictures on your computer such as ‘My Pictures’.
  • Flickr photo sharing – selecting pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random. You never know what you’re going to get next!
  • Facebook – your friends photos on your desktop!
  • Instagram – photos from the most awesome photo app out there!
  • Vladstudio wallpapers – choose from the coolest wallpapers on the net!
  • Any Media RSS feed – choose pictures from sites like DeviantArt, Photobucket, LOLCats and Zooomr amongst many others!
  • Phanfare web albums – keep up to date with your friends and family.
  • smugmug photo galleries – yours, your friends, anybody’s!
  • Picasa Web Albums – choose from specific albums or any search text.
  • Webshots – if you’re a Webshots user, you can choose from your online or downloaded photos and collections.
  • Google Image Search – get pictures from anywhere across the internet.

John's Background Switcher information

Our users have written 7 comments and reviews about John's Background Switcher, and it has gotten 67 likes

John's Background Switcher was added to AlternativeTo by Aerialsky on and this page was last updated . John's Background Switcher is sometimes referred to as JBS.