I needed a background changer, since the one in thunar didnt seem to work and installing feh seemed to involve dependencies, so i cooked one up my self using the thunar send to function and a couple of lines of perl / shell.

Using this script you can click on a picture file and have a sendto option in thunar that will place it as your desktop background. If the picture is a smaller size than your desktop resolution it may not display correctly. Otherwise its ok.

First create the sendto entry in thunar:

Place a text file in /usr/share/Thunar/sendto/ containing this text:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=/home/m0rl0ck/scripts/switcher %F
Icon=gnome-terminal.png
Name=Switcher

The file should be named "thunar-sendto-switcher.desktop" The Exec line above needs to be the absolute path to the file, and make sure that is followed by %F

This is the script that the Exec line above points to:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$pic=$ARGV[0];
$RES="1280x1024";
`display -dispose Background -window root -resize $RES $ARGV[0]`;


Change $RES to the size of your desktop (dont forget to put the desktop size inside quotes) and save the file as "switcher". Make sure the Exec line in the first file points to the "switcher" file we just saved. The switcher file we just created needs to be executable so in the directory where you saved it run "chmod +x switcher".

Exit and restart thunar. Right click on a picture file you would like as a background and choose Switcher.

Mya be this could be a patch for XFCE. Why not contact XFCE developers.

I use similar approach to provide wallpaper plugin to zenwalk-openbox since the one in Thunar doesn't work with openbox.
I added this line in .config/Thunar/uca.xml


and made this 1liner that does the job.

now you just right click on image and select "Set as wallpaper" and it changes it according to your screen resolution and saves it so that it's used again in next login.
Notice that these both methods need imagemagick.

EDIT: I never knew that the new Thunar wallpaper plugin in xfce doesn't work,,anyone else can confirm this, it is a bug if confirmed.

Wow, great stuff. A much better solution than mine i think. Thanks

Hi, I am using Z7.0 Openbox. I noticed one potential issue in the background changer script. I was trying to make an image lying on Win partition as my background. Since the path name had spaces it was not showing up image despite right-clicking and clicking on 'set as wallpaper', although the script was referring to the correct image file.

I copied the same image to my linux partition and it worked perfectly. Can this script be slightly modified to catch this potential problem?