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Introduction

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Sticky Photo Wall transforms your Linux desktop in an attractive photo wall with all your nicest pictures.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Features
• Installation
• Upgrading
• Usage
• Release Notes
• Copyright and License

Features

• 2 orientations: landscape and portrait.
• 3 sizes: small, medium, large.
• 3 rotations: straight, skewed clockwise, skewed counterclockwise.

Installation

Requirements

To use StickyPhotoWall, you need:

• A Linux operating system.
• The latest release of Conky.

Installation Procedure

Step 1 - Install Conky

Install Conky (conky-all package) using a package manager on your Linux OS or using the latest version from the Conky website.

Step 2 - Download and Extract StickyPhotoWall

• Go to the Releases page to download the source code of the latest StickyPhotoWall release.
• On the Releases page, in the Assets section, click on the Source code (tar.gz) link to download the sources.
• Save the tar.gz file with the sources on your system.
• Create a folder .conky/sticky_photo_wall in your home directory.
• Extract all contents of main StickyPhotoWall-[version x.y.z] folder in the tar.gz file to the .conky/sticky_photo_wall folder in the home directory of your system.

Step 3 - Prepare for first run

• Open the ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall directory.
• Open the file sticky_photo_wall.conky in that directory and replace the occurences of _your_user_home_dir_name_ with your user home directory name.

lua_load = '/home/_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/sticky_photo_wall.lua',
lua_startup_hook = 'conky_config /home/_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/',

should be replaced with the code below (in this example the user home directory name is cthru)

lua_load = '/home/cthru/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/sticky_photo_wall.lua',
lua_startup_hook = 'conky_config /home/cthru/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/',

Step 4 - First run

• Open a Terminal window.
• Change the current directory.

cd ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall

• Start StickyPhotoWall using the command below. Replace your_user_home_dir_name with your user home directory name.

conky -c /home/your_user_home_dir_name/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/sticky_photo_wall.conky

Step 5 (optional) - Autostart

• Open the autostart_sticky_photo_wall.sh with a text editor and change the second line to your home directory.

   #!/bin/sh
   MY_HOME=/home/_your_user_home_dir_name_

  Example: for a user that is called cthru, change the second line as follows:

   #!/bin/sh
   MY_HOME=/home/cthru

• Add the autostart_sticky_photo_wall.sh script to the Startup Applications of your linux OS. You can do this via the user interface.
  Alternatively, you can create a sticky_photo_wall.desktop file in the ~/.config/autostart folder.
  You can use the example sticky_photo_wall.desktop file provided, but you need to edit the file as follows.
  • Replace the text _your_user_home_dir_name_ from the line below with your user home directory name.

     Exec=/home/_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/autostart_sticky_photo_wall.sh
    

  • Copy the file.

    cd ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall
    cp sticky_photo_wall.desktop ~/.config/autostart/sticky_photo_wall.desktop

Upgrading

• Take a backup of your configuration files

  cd ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall
  mkdir backup
  cp sticky_photo_wall.conky backup/
  cp my_photo_wall.lua backup/

• Download and extract the upgrade as explained in the Installation section above.

• Check the release notes for any syntax changes to the configuration files to be able to apply them as necessary to your configuration.

• Copy or manually edit (as necessary) (the contents of) your configuration files in the ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall directory.

  To copy your backed up configuration files, you can use the following commands in a terninal window:

  cd ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall
  cp backup/sticky_photo_wall.conky .
  cp backup/my_photo_wall.lua .

Usage

To customize your personal photo wall, you will need to perform the following steps.

Prepare your photos

All pictures you wish to use must be in the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format.

Create a .png file of your photos in the folder ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall/resources/photos.

Place your photos on the desktop

Set the relative position on screen

To change the relative position of your photo wall on screen, follow the steps below.

• Open the sticky_photo_wall.conky file and look for the section with conky's parameters below

	-- alignment: [top /  middle / bottom]-[ left / middle / right]
	alignment = 'middle_middle',
	-- change minimum_width and minimum_height parameters to your screen resolution for full screen display
	minimum_width = 640,
	minimum_height = 480,
	gap_x = 0,
	gap_y = 0,

E.g. if you have a Full HD display with resolution 1920x1080, and you want a sticky photo wall over your whole screen with a margin of 10 pixels on each side, you would have a configuration that looks like this

	-- alignment: [top /  middle / bottom]-[ left / middle / right]
	alignment = 'top_left',
	-- change minimum_width and minimum_height parameters to your screen resolution for full screen display
	minimum_width = 1900,
	minimum_height = 1060,
	gap_x = 10,
	gap_y = 10,

Put your photos on screen

To create your own photo wall file, follow the steps below.

• Create a my_photo_wall.lua file in the folder ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall.
  For first time users, you can copy the demo code from the file ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall

cd ~/.conky/sticky_photo_wall
cp demo_photo_wall.lua my_photo_wall.lua

• Change the name of the function draw_demo_photo_wall to draw_my_photo_wall.

• Follow the instructions in the file.

Release Notes

For a full changelog of all versions, please look in CHANGELOG.md.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2022 Christoph Vanthuyne

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Read the full license information here.

If you're more into a TL;DR approach, start here.