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windows-spotlight

A simple utility to find and copy Windows spotlight images on your Windows PC to your preferred destination so that they can be used as wallpapers and such.

Run as a windows executable

Prerequisites

OS: Windows
Packages: git, python3, pip

Steps

In a Windows powershell or command prompt, run the following:

  1. git clone https://github.com/agrawpri/windows-spotlight
  2. cd windows-spotlight
  3. python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
  4. python3 -m pip install pyinstaller
  5. $env:path += ';C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local\Packages\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.10_qbz5n2kfra8p0\LocalCache\local-packages\Python310\Scripts;'
  6. pyinstaller.exe --onefile --windowed driver.py

This should generate a ./dist/main.exe. Just run (double-click) this file, and it should copy all the spotlight images to C:\Users\Admin\Pictures\Spotlight. Rerun once every day to copy new images downloaded that day.

Run as a docker container

Prerequisites

OS: Windows(10+)
Installations: Docker desktop, git

Steps

In a Windows powershell or command prompt, run the following:

  1. git clone https://github.com/agrawpri/windows-spotlight
  2. cd windows-spotlight
  3. docker-compose run --rm windows-spotlight

Rerun step #3 once every day to copy new images downloaded that day to C:\Users\Admin\Pictures\Spotlight. That's it!

Notice how using docker simplifies the workflow so much. This is because of the following reasons:

  • You don't need to have python3/pip pre-installed. Instead, we can just use a docker image which has those installed.
  • You don't manually need to install python requirements (pip install) since the Dockerfile already knows to do that.
  • You don't need to use something like pyinstaller to build a Windows executable out of this source code. Windows (10+) natively supports running linux based docker containers.

Project Goal

I love Windows's spotlight images and always wanted to set them as wallpapers. However, Windows does not provide this feature. So, I decided to develop a simple Windows application (.exe) which I could use to find and save the windows spotlight images to a folder of my choice so that I could use them as wallpapers.

Solution

To achieve the objective, I first figured out where and how the spotlight images are stored in Windows. Then, I wrote a python script to transfer the images to a preferred destination. Then, I setup a workflow to package the python script into a Windows executable so that this application could be distributed easily i.e. downloaded by other people who want to do the same. I also built a docker image out of my application and pushed it to DockerHub to make it easy for people to build the binary (.exe) from source and run it locally.