Custom Windows Spotlight
Intro
Windows introduced a feature called Windows Spotlight where every day, it would find interesting pictures on the internet and use them as your lockscreen. It's cool and all, but what if you don't want landscape pictures all the time? Getting to choose what type of pictures you want is better.
Problem/Inspiration
This project idea originally came as a request from a friend. She wanted her laptop's lock screen to update with NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD). I thought it would be an interesting project so I decided to try building something.
The Process
The plan was simple:
1. Webscrape NASA's APoD website for that day's picture
2. Save the picture.
3. Update the lock screen.
Remarks
Getting the APoD was easy enough, NASA's website wasn't particularly complex and the simple HTML made it easy to find the images I was looking for.
The program was written in Python as it had many libraries (BeautifulSoup) I can use to get a working product as fast as possible. Including the time it took for me to learn how to use the library, steps 1 and 2 were done in a few hours. Step 3 was by far the most difficult and time-consuming, as it involved having me reverse-engineer and reserach how Windows Spotlight worked. Long story short, the answer was that it was practically impossible without having to dive into some obscure Windows source code. Instead, I got creative and found a different route I could take.
Windows allows you to set static lock screen pictures, so if I could find where that picture was stored, I could theoretically overwrite and update that "static" picture and get a new picture every day! With that idea in mind, I wrote the complete Python script and used Windows Scheduler run that program every morning when I log in, successfully updating the picture every day.
However, there was still one last minor problem. Sometimes, the APoD is a video instead of a picture, so I added a minor patch that shows your favorite picture as the lock screen whenever the APoD is not a picture.
Windows introduced a feature called Windows Spotlight where every day, it would find interesting pictures on the internet and use them as your lockscreen. It's cool and all, but what if you don't want landscape pictures all the time? Getting to choose what type of pictures you want is better.
Problem/Inspiration
This project idea originally came as a request from a friend. She wanted her laptop's lock screen to update with NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD). I thought it would be an interesting project so I decided to try building something.
The Process
The plan was simple:
1. Webscrape NASA's APoD website for that day's picture
2. Save the picture.
3. Update the lock screen.
Remarks
Getting the APoD was easy enough, NASA's website wasn't particularly complex and the simple HTML made it easy to find the images I was looking for.
The program was written in Python as it had many libraries (BeautifulSoup) I can use to get a working product as fast as possible. Including the time it took for me to learn how to use the library, steps 1 and 2 were done in a few hours. Step 3 was by far the most difficult and time-consuming, as it involved having me reverse-engineer and reserach how Windows Spotlight worked. Long story short, the answer was that it was practically impossible without having to dive into some obscure Windows source code. Instead, I got creative and found a different route I could take.
Windows allows you to set static lock screen pictures, so if I could find where that picture was stored, I could theoretically overwrite and update that "static" picture and get a new picture every day! With that idea in mind, I wrote the complete Python script and used Windows Scheduler run that program every morning when I log in, successfully updating the picture every day.
However, there was still one last minor problem. Sometimes, the APoD is a video instead of a picture, so I added a minor patch that shows your favorite picture as the lock screen whenever the APoD is not a picture.