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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

It may seem obvious, but for those who haven't tried it: The effect of high-res great art on a high-res luminescent screen can be magical. It puts all those other desktop backgrounds to shame - instantly revealing how incredible some of these images are. Make one your desktop background.

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I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of.

Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and just let my artistic perception develop organically.

How did you get the watermarks. Programmatically and if so how. Or did they come that way

There's many ways to skin that cat - assuming Unix, immediate options include:

the images are stored locally, you have some mapping from filename to title, and you create new images with watermarks using ImageMagick in a bash script

or the images are hosted online, and you write a small C/Python/whatever code that gets the URLs and associated titles from the host, and then uses Imlib2 (maybe with some wrapper) to display the images with titles rendered as text composited on top

Yea I was trying to find a way to do it with code that's by default shipped on the mac. Unfortunately imagemagick is not. And the php functions to actually add text to an image are not loaded by default. Maybe I can do something by converting the images to pdfs. The speed of the program isn't an issue it just has to be completely automated.

finally found a way to do it with applescript objective c :)

I used a script that relied on Imagemagick.

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